
Qass 



Book 



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3 X. 




THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 



THE CONFESSIONS 

OF 

AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 

Bn'ns an l£.rtract from i\}t ilife of a <Sdjolar 

^^ 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

M 

(Reprinted froui The London Magazine for September and October, 
1821, and December, 182'2) 

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
BY 

ARTHUK BEATTY, Ph.D. 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 

Choice iooi'(l and measured phrase, above the reach 
Of ordinary men ; a. stcttely speech. 

' "^ t 

THE. ^^ACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1900 

All rights reserved 



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By the M ACM ill an COMPANY. 



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INTRODUCTION XV 

to maintain himself during a tramp in the Welsh 
mountains. He wandered about Wales from July to 
November, 1802, keeping up a correspondence with 
his friends at first ; but later he cut himself off from 
them completely, thus depriving himself of his allow- 
ance from home, which had been granted on condition 
of his keeping his friends informed of his whereabouts. 
His vagrancy began in Wales, and in November, 1802, 
he " took that wonderful plunge into London " (to 
use Masson's w^ords) ; and now began that all-impor- 
tant period of his vagrancy — his life in London. 
He himself calls this episode an ^' impassioned paren- 
thesis " in his life ; and such, indeed, it is, for the 
sufferings he now endured, united with those endured 
in Wales, caused the disorders which led to the taking 
of opium, with all the amazing consequences. The 
events of this period are all told in the Confessions 
with such delicacy and candor that nothing more can 
be added. 

By some means a way was opened for a return to 
his friends, and in the autumn of 1803 we find him 
duly entered as a student at Worcester College, Ox- 
ford. Here he remained for four years, practically 
unknown, but busily engaged in reading all manner 
of books, especially those of English literature. It 
was during this period that he learned the use of 
opium, on one of his frequent visits to Loudon, in 



XVI INTRODUCTION 

1804. Just before graduation he suddenly left the 
University, because his great shyness led him to fear 
the oral examinations, despite the fact that he had 
passed most brilliant written ones. 

Next year, 1808, we find him in London, ostensibly 
studying law, but in reality carrying on his reading 
over still greater ranges of literature and science, and 
making the acquaintance of many of the leading 
literary men of the day. Such was his faith in Cole- 
ridge, that, soon after he made his acquaintance, he 
gave him £300, through Cottle, Coleridge's publisher. 
At this time began his acquaintance with Charles 
Lamb, which later ripened into intimacy. Through 
Coleridge he also met Wordsworth, with whom he had 
been carrying on a correspondence from the earliest 
years of his university course. 

In 1809, as a result of this meeting, De Quincey 
went to live at Grasmere, in order that he might be 
near Wordsworth. Here he lived his bachelor life 
until 1816, when he married Margaret Simpson, the 
daughter of a " statesman," or hereditary farmer, of 
Westmoreland. He remained in Grasmere until 1821, 
engaged in his extensive reading, in writing for the 
Westmoreland Gazette, BlackivoocVs Edinhtirgh Maga- 
zine, the Quarterly Bevieto, and in editing the West- 
moreland Gazette for a year. In spite of the fact that 
his writing brought him in considerable income, his 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

extravagant habits consumed this, together with the 
somewhat large inheritance from his father ; and he 
began to feel the pinch of want. So, in the year 1820, 
he went down to London to seek for literary opportu- 
nities, and was fortunate enough to secure an intro- 
duction to Taylor and Hessey, the publishers of the 
London Magazine, the most important London peri- 
odical at that time. As a result of this introduction 
there appeared, in the September and October num- 
bers for 1821, a long, anonymous article in two parts, 
entitled The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater : 
Being an Extract from the Life- of a Scholar. The 
greatest interest was aroused ; De Quincey's career was 
determined ; and from this time forward his energies 
expressed themselves almost exclusively in contribu- 
tions to the magazines. 

He soon returned to his wife and family in Gras- 
mere, and continued to live there until 1828, when he 
went to Edinburgh in search of a wider literary field 
than was afforded him by the Lake district. Edin- 
burgh was well known to him, as were many of the 
leading literary lights of the northern capital, since 
he had visited that city in the winter of 1814-1815, for 
the purpose of visiting John Wilson, better known in 
literature as Christopher North, with whom De Quincey 
had been made acquainted by Wordsworth. Relying 
on his acquaintance with the literary men of Edin- 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

burgh, he went in hopes of relieving his increasing 
financial difficulties by means of profitable literary 
work ; nor was he disappointed, for he began almost 
at once to write for BlackwoocVs Magazine^ and for 
Tait's Magazine. In a couple of years he began to 
feel somewhat established in Edinburgh, and in 1830 
Mrs. De Quincey and the children came to live with 
him. They lived here and there in the city, never 
remaining long in one place. In 1837 Mrs. De Quincey 
died, and in 1840 De Quincey and his children settled 
in Lasswade, near Edinburgh, where he made his 
home for the rest of his life, though he spent most of 
his time in lodgings in the city. 

There is little more to tell about him. From 1851 
to 1859 his time was largely taken up with gathering 
his writings from the various magazines to which he 
had contributed, into a collected edition. So great 
was his popularity in Am.erica that, in 1851, Mr. Fields 
began the issue of a collective edition; and in 1853 
Hogg, the publisher of Hogg^s Instructor, to which 
De Quincey was at this time a regular contributor, took 
the hint from the American publisher, and urged 
De Quincey 's consent to a similar enterprise. The first 
volume appeared in 1853, and the last one in 1860, the 
year after his death, which occurred on the 8th of 
December, 1859. 



INTRODUCTION XIX 



HISTORY OF THE CONFESSIONS 

When De Quincey came to London in 1821, his 
acquaintance with Taylor and Hessey, the pro^orietors 
of the London Magazine, led to the publication of the 
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in the columns 
of that periodical. The Confessions appeared in the 
September and October numbers for 1821, occupying 
pages 293 to 312 (in double columns), and 353 to 379 
of Volume IV. These portions consist of Parts I. and 
II. in their short, original form. 

The interest aroused by these papers was very great ; 
and in connection with a note sent by De Quincey, cor- 
recting a slight chronological error in the first part, the 
editor speaks, in the October number, of the articles in 
the following terms : — 

" We are not often in the habit of eulogising our own work ; 
but we cannot neglect the opportunity which the following 
explanatory note gives us of calling the attention of our readers 
to the deep, eloquent, and masterly paper which stands first in 
our present number. Such Confessions, so powerfully uttered, 
cannot fail to do more than interest the reader." 

The public clamored for still more Confessions; and 
in a letter printed in the December number of the 
London Magazine for 1821 De Quincey promised to 
supply this demand by a Third Part which would 



XX INTR OD UCTION 

" record the particular effects of Opium between 1804- 
12," and which he hoped to draw up with such as- 
sistance from fuller memoranda as he should be able 
to command on his return to the north. The editors 
definitely announced this promised Third Part in the 
same number of their magazine; but months passed 
on, and no Third Part appeared. Finally, in the De- 
cember number of 1822, or one year after the prom- 
ise of the Third Part, there appeared an Appendix to 
the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, on pages 
512-517 of Volume VI. This Appendix had been pre- 
pared for the Confessions, on their publication in book 
form in 1822, and serves as an apology by both author 
and publisher for the non-appearance of the long- 
promised Third Part. This Ai^pendix, so well char- 
acterized by Masson as '' whimsical," has little or no 
connection with the rest of the book, and destroys its 
symmetry. It must not be thought of as being a part 
of the work in any artistic sense, as it does nothing 
toward making us better understand or appreciate 
the earlier parts. It is reprinted in this edition only 
because it was the conclusion written by De Quincey, 
and because of its bibliographical interest. 

This closes the history of the work for the first 
thirty-odd years of its existence, except that as many 
as six editions appeared between 1821 and 1856. In 
the latter year the Collective Edition had reached the 



INTBODUCTION xxi 

fifth volume, and De Quincey himself explains the sit- 
uation, in a letter to his daughter, October, 1855, as 
follows : — 

"A doubt had arisen whether, with my own horrible recoil 
from the labour of converging and unpacking all hoards of 
MSS., I could count on bringing together enough of the ' Sus- 
pira ' (yet unpublished) materially to enlarge the volume. If 
not, this volume (standing amongst sister volumes of 320-360 
pp.) would present only a beggarly amount of 120 pp. Upon 
which arose this dilemma — Either the volume must be strength- 
ened by the addition of papers altogether alien, which to me was 
eminently disagreeable, as breaking up the unity of the volume 
— or else, if left in the slenderness of figure, would really to my 
feeling involve us in an act that looked very like swindling. How 
could 7s. M. be reasonably charged to the public for what obvi- 
ously was but a third part in bulk of the other volumes ? But 
could not the price for this anomalous volume have been com- 
mensurately lessened? No. Mr. H[ogg], the publisher, who 
knows, of course, so much more than I do about such cases, as- 
sures me that nothing so much annoys the trade as any interrup- 
tion of the price scale upon a series of volumes. Such being the 
case, no remedy remained but that I should doctor the book, 
and expand it into a portliness that might countenance its price, 
I should, however, be misleading you if any impression were 
left upon your mind that I had eked out the volume by any 
wire-drawing process : on the contrary, nothing has been added 
which did not originally belong to my outline of the work, hav- 
ing been left out chiefly through hurry at the period of first, i.e. 
original, publication in the autumn of 1821." i 

1 A. H. Japp, Thomas De Quincey : His Life and Writings, 
pp. 387-388. 



XXll INTRODUCTION 

Accordingly, the book was published in 1856 in a 
greatly enlarged form ; and in this same letter we have 
the author's own judgment on the new form of the 
work : — 

"It is almost rewritten ; and there cannot be much doubt 
that here and there it is enlivened, and so far improved. To 
justify the enormous labour it has cost me, most certainly it 
ought to be improved. And yet, reviewing the volume as a tvJiole, 
}M)yv that I can look back from nearly the end to the beginning, 
greatly I doubt whether many readers will not prefer it in its 
original fragmentary state to its present full-blown develop- 
ment." 1 

We thus see tliat De Quincey was very little satisfied 
with the "improved" version, and that as an artistic 
whole he favored the earlier version. This judgment 
later critics have amply upheld ; and the words of Gar- 
nett admirably sum up the state of critical opinion on 
the subject : — 

I "The additions to the Opium-Eater are for the most part 
brilliant superfluities. They are not indeed mere excrescences, 
and may rather be compared to those excursions and variations 
into which a musician may be betrayed by consciousness of mas- 
tery and pleasure in execution until he has lost sight of his origi- 
nal theme. They convert the brief, pregnant narrative of one 
episode in a life into a diffuse autobiography." ^ 

1 A. H. Japp, Thomas De Quincey : His Life and Writings, 
pp. 387-388. 

2 Richard Garnett, Confessions, p. viii. 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

There can be no doubt that this is perfectly true ; for 
in the enlarged edition the First Part is intolerably- 
long and involved, to the extent of positive obscurity. 

But even if the two versions were more equally mer- 
itorious, the fact that the work in its original form had 
been before the public for over thirty years as the only 
version, and the fact that it had been recognized as 
one of the minor English classics long before the re- 
vised edition made its appearance, abundantly justifies 
us in preferring the earlier version, even though it is 
not the authoritative form. 

The work as it appeared in the magazine is chosen 
as the text of the present edition, rather than the re- 
print of 1822, because it is probably nearer to what 
De Quincey actually wrote than that volume. At any 
rate, it is probable that it received somewhat more 
attention in proof. (See p. 162.) 

STYLE OF THE CONFESSIONS 

In the biographical sketch of De Quincey we have 
tried to point out the truth of the various incidents 
recorded in the work, and thus to show that the book 
is a very real "human document," a veritable tran- 
script from the author's life. But, while this is true, 
and while this faithfulness and truth to his unique 
experiences does give to the book an enduring interest, 



XXIV INTR OD UCTION 

it remains true that the permanence and lasting qual- 
ity of the book does not arise from this cause, but from 
something far different. Many books live for no reason 
other than that the things they contain are of last- 
ing value. They contain the thoughts, the ideas, or 
the principles, that mankind most needs for its best 
life ; and so their content alone guarantees their last- 
ing vitality, in spite of the lapse of time and indepen- 
dently of the faults or excellences of the manner in 
which the contents are expressed. Other books, again, 
live, not because the thoughts or principles that they 
contain are important, but often because their very 
mediocre thought, which has very little worth in its 
naked form, acquires a new value through perfection 
of expression. Such books live, as we say, by their 
style; and it is to this latter class that the Confessions 
belongs ; for, w^hile the matter contained in the book 
is not by any means trivial or mediocre, it remains true 
that the book is not the expression of any great thought 
or principle. Of course, the book derives a great part 
of its interest from the unique experience which it re- 
cords, and from the intimate view it gives us of the 
author's personality, his sensations, his ideas, and his 
feelings ; but, on the other hand, none of the things 
recorded in the book have any very great value, in the 
intellectual or moral sense of the word. Indeed, we 
may say that, in common with the whole class of con- 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

fessions, the book labors under the disadvantage of 
approaching to morbidity, because it records things and 
experiences that are usually regarded as too personal 
and intimate for public view. Moreover, the book is 
a revelation of the rise and progress of a vice, with all 
its frightful and demoralizing consequences. From 
this charge of morbidity the book is delivered only 
by the childlike purity and delicacy of the author's 
treatment. 

Nor does the book reveal any excuse for its being 
written because of some great moral or ethical impulse 
which drove the author to expression. Indeed, there 
is little or no interest in questions of conduct or mo- 
rality shown in the book, nor does the author seem to 
have considered in any serious way the possible serious 
consequences of his revelations. He does defend him- 
self from the charge of sensuality in his indulgence in 
opium-eating and of a lack of moral sense, but he does 
not enter very heartily into the defence, nor is it woven 
into the texture of the narrative. It is not meant by 
this that De Quincey was immoral : all that is meant 
is that his very purity and childlike simplicity did 
not permit him to see the possible moral question 
involved, from the grosser standpoint of the average 
mortal. 

Since the Confessions contains no great intellectual 
or moral matter, how are we then to account for the 



XXVI INTRODUCTION 

undoubted vitality of the book ? There is only one 
answer, and that is that the book is great and impor- 
tant as literature because of its style. When we con- 
sider its style, we see why almost from its first 
publication it was regarded as a minor classic ; for 
it has those qualities that are characteristic of all 
great literature — distinction of treatment, choiceness 
of word and phrase, adequacy of expression — by means 
of which the thought and emotion of the book stand 
out in all the clearness of their original conception. 

But while the book is distinguished by its style, the 
style possesses a peculiar quality. It is not a style of 
rounded fulness, such as is the expression of a man, 
who, full of thought and burning with emotion, can 
yet fuse both and give utterance to what is in him in 
calm and balanced phrase. The style, as is the case 
with most writers, is more or less one-sided ; and the 
quality lacking in De Quincey is the intellectual one, 
wdiile the emotional and imaginative qualities stand 
out with distinctive excellence. By this is not meant 
that the style is not clear : clear it certainly is, in that 
the thought is adequately expressed, but the clearness 
is not so much the clearness of the logical faculty as 
the clearness of the feelings. In nearly every case 
the clearness is not clearness of thought solely and 
simply, but it is that clearness which loses itself in 
vividness of feeling and emotion. To be sure, De 



INTRODUCTION- xxvii 

Quincey himself lias laid claim to being an analytical 
and logical thinker, and others have supported it ; but 
his work, as a body, contains comparatively little ana- 
lytical thought. At any rate, the ]3arts that display 
his analytic faculty are not the memorable or char- 
acteristic parts by which he lives in literature. His 
best and most distinctive work is the outcome of the 
opposite mode of thought, that is, the imaginative.^ 
The words and phrases are chosen, not to dissect the 
idea or thing, so to speak, but to paint it as it is in 
real life, palpitating Avith vitality, and surrounded 
with all the associated ideas and emotions with which 
we surround the persons and things in daily life. He 
says in the Confessions that he was "made an intel- 
lectual creature" from his birth, and that "intellec- 
tual in the highest sense " his pursuits and interests 
were. But while De Quincey undoubtedly Avas inter- 
ested profoundly in the things of the mind, over all 
the book there is an atmosphere, not of intellectuality, 
but of sentiment and feeling. Macaulay and Matthew 
Arnold are intellectual ; and we have only to mention 
these names to bring out the difference between their 
pages and those of the Confessions. The characteristic 
passages of the Confessions — the flight from school, 
the trunk, the outcast Ann, the incident of the Malay, 
and lastly the magnificent opium-drearas — would all 
become either trivial or vulgar or ridiculous, were it 



xxvill INTRODUCTION 

not for the ennobling touch of the sweet and pensive 
melancholy with which the whole book is suffused. 
'In such creations the intellect plays only a very sub- 
ordinate part : feeling and imagination are their very 
life and substance. Indeed, so dominant are De 
Quincey's sensations and emotions that they seem 
to get the better of his judgment at times. Hence 
the somewhat irreverent jesting in the midst of 
serious passages, the facetious digressions, and the 
hundred other irritating peculiarities with which his 
readers are familiar. Such blemishes are very few 
in the Confessions; but they appear with sufficient 
plainness to show that De Quincey retained the irre- 
sponsible gayety of the child, which constantly broke 
through the dignity and reserve of manhood. 

De Quincey's style has been called poetic; and it is 
certain that no prose has more nearly approached the 
realm of poetry, in that it exhibits a freer play of the 
imagination than does that of almost any other writer. 
This is especially seen in those passages of the Con- 
fessions which contain his impassioned addresses, and 
in those which describe his opium-dreams. It is to 
be noticed that in these dreams the scenery and objects 
are for the most part vague and undefined. Objects 
do not stand out clearly through the gorgeous imagery 
and diction : we are given the idea of vast extents of 
time and space, of centuries on centuries, of infinite 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

cloud, of mighty mountain : all is magnificence and 
grandeur; but one object melts into another, not re- 
taining its clearness and distinctness of outline, as, for 
instance, in Dante, in whom the organizing intellectual 
activity was sufficiently strong to retain distinctness of 
outline in the object without destroying its grandeur. 
These are the most striking pages in the book, and 
they show most clearly the characteristics of its style. 
When w^e take into account this dominance of the 
emotional over the intellectual, we are not surprised 
to find that one of the chief sources of the peculiar 
quality of the style is the excellence of the dioice of 
ivords. The word is the primary element out of which 
a composition in prose or verse is built up; and the poet 
and the imaginative prose writer attach much more 
importance to the single word than does the intellec- 
tual, or logical, writer. With the poet and the imagina- 
tive prose writer, the words have an individuality, they 
stand for something individually, and hence it is in 
the poet and the imaginative writer that we see the 
most careful choice of words. In the choice of words, 
in this imaginative sense, the Confessions stands su- 
preme among prose compositions. Examples abound 
throughout the book, of De Quincey's almost unerring 
sense for words. Indeed, carefully to study the book 
is in itself an education in this exquisite and all- 
important branch of composition. 



XXX INTRODUCTION- 

Not only in the choice of single words, but in the 
grouping of them into sentences and paragraphs, does 
De Quincey occupy a very high place, and in some 
respects a unique one. His ear is of remarkable sensi- 
tiveness to sound effects, and his knowledge of the 
English vocabulary is so extensive that his sentences 
and paragraphs are things of beauty in themselves ; 
and are so remarkable for stately rhythm, or for 
sweetness of sound, or for smoothness of flow, that we 
do not notice the extreme slightness of the thought 
that often underlies them. As Leslie Stephen says : — 

" Language, according to the common phrase, is the dress of 
thought ; and that dress is the best, according to modern canons 
of taste, which attracts least attention from its wearer. De 
Quincey scorns this sneaking maxim of prudence, and boldly 
challenges our admiration by appearing in the richest colouring 
that can be got out of the dictionary. His language deserves a 
commendation sometimes bestowed by ladies upon rich gar- 
ments, that it is capable of standing up by itself. The form 
is so admirable that, for purposes of criticism, we must con- 
sider it as something apart from the substance, f The most ex- 
quisite passages in De Quincey's writings are all more or less 
attempts to carry out the idea expressed in the title of the 
dream fugue. They are intended to be musiccil compositions, 
in which words have to play the part of notes. They are im- 
passioned, not in the sense of expressing any definite sentiment, 
but because, from the structure and combination of the sen- 
tences, they harmonise with certain phases of emotion." i 

1 Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library^ First Series, pp. 356-357. 



IN TROD UCTION xxxi 

De Quincey has divided literature into two classes : 
the literature of knoivledge and the literature of power. 
It is to this latter class that his own writings belong ; 
and they belong to it, not because they show a high 
order of constructive imagination, but almost solely 
because they show a marvellous power of expressing 
emotion in the inevitable word or phrase, which stands 
out as a thing of perfect beauty in itself. They live 
because they are the expression of a man who is 
keenly alive to a few of the primary feelings and 
emotions of himself and of humanity, and who ex- 
presses them in language which is so perfect a mirror 
that we feel and experience these feelings and emo- 
tions almost as vividly as in life. Perhaps the words 
of Wordsworth that are quoted on the title-page do not 
fall far short of a definitive summary of De Quincey's 
distinctive significance in English prose : — 

' ' Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach 
Of ordinary men; a stately speech." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



(1) Works : De Quincey's Collected Writings, edited by David 

Masson, 14 vols., veitli good index. London. 
De Quincey's Works, 14 vols. Boston. 

(2) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater : 

The London Magazine, September and October, 

1821 ; December, 1822. 
First edition (in book form), English edition, 
1822. 
American edition, eilited by Fields, 

1851. 
Edited by Garnett, 1885. 
Edited by Sharp, 1886. 
Second edition, 1850. 

Edited by Hunter, 1896. 
Partly first and partly second edition, edited by 
Wauchope, 1898. 

(3) Life of De Quincey : 

Autobiography, Vols. • I. and II, of Collected 
Writings. 

H. A. Page (i.e. A. IT. Japp), Thomas De Quin- 
cey : His Life and Writings. 

David Masson, De Quincey (in English Men of 
Letters Series). 

xxxii 



BIBLIOGRAPHY XXXIU 

H. A. Page {i.e. A. H. Japp), De Quincey 3Ie- 
morials. 

James Hogg, De Quincey and his Friends. 
(Contains very interesting and valuable rem- 
iniscences and recollections by Woodliouse, 
Eae-Brown, Findlay, Hogg, Jacox, Payn ; 
essays by Burton and Hodgson ; and a Life by 
Page (Japp). 
(4) Criticism : 

Leslie Stephen, Life of De Quiticey (in Dictionary 
of National Biography). 

Peter Bayne, Essays on Biography and Criticism. 

J. Scott Cla,rk, A Study of English Prose Writers. 

G. Gilfillan, Literary Portraits. 

Shadwortli Hodgson, The Genius of De Quincey 
(in Outcast Essays, or in Hogg's De Quincey 
and his Friends). 

T. W. Hunt, Bepresentative English Prose. 

David Masson, Essays Biographical and Critical. 

W. Minto, English Prose Literature. 

Mrs. Oliphant, Victorian Age of English Litera- 
ture. 

George Saintsbury, Essays on English Literature, 
{1780-1860). 

Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, I. 

Atlantic Monthly, XII., 345-308. 

Quarterly Review, CCX., 1-35. 

Bevue des deux mondes, CXXXVIIL, 116-146, 
and 343-376. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH 
OPIUM-EATER 

PART T 



TO THE READER 

I HERE present you, courteous reader, with the 
record of a remarkable period in my life : according 
to my application of it, I trust that it will prove, not 
merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable 
degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is, that 
I have drawn it up : and that must be my apology for 
breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, 
which, for the most part, restrains us from the public 
exposure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, 
indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, than the 
spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice 
his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that 
°" decent drapery," which time, or indulgence to 

B 1 



2 CONFESSION'S OF AN 

human frailty, may have drawn over them : accord- 
ingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, 
spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed 
from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers : and for any 
5 such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation from those 
who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent 
and self-respecting part of society, we must look to 
"French literature, or to °that part of the German, 
which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensi- 

10 bility of the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and 
so nervously am I alive to reproach of this tendency, 
that I have for many months hesitated about the pro- 
priety of allowing this, or any part of my narrative, 
to come before the public eye, until after my death 

15 (when, for many reasons, the whole will be published) : 
and it is uot without an anxious review of the reasons, 
for and against this step, that I have, at last, concluded 
on taking it. 

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from 

20 public notice : they court privacy and solitude : and, 
even in their choice of a grave^ will sometimes seques- 
ter themselves from the general population of the 
churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with 
the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting 

25 language of Mr. AVordsworth) 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 3 

°liumbly to express 

A penitential loneliness. 

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of 
us all, that it should be so : nor would I willingly, in 
my own person, manifest a disregard of such salutary 5 
feelings; nor in act or word do anything to weaken 
them. But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation 
does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the 
other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting 
to others, from the record of an experience purchased 10 
at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast over- 
balance, for any violence done to the feelings I have 
noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. 
Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply 
guilt. They approach, or recede from, the shades of 15 
that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable 
motives and prospects of the offender, and the j^allia- 
tions, known or secret, of the offence : in proportion 
as the temptations to it were potent from the first, 
and the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest 20 
to the last. For my own part, without breach of truth 
or modesty, I may aftirm, that my life has been, on the 
whole, the life of a ])hilosopher : from my birth I was 
made an intellectual creature : and intellectual in the 
highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, 25 



4 COyFUSSlOJVS OF AN 

even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a 
sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I 
have indulged in it to an excess, °not yet recorded of 
any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled 

5 against this fascinating enthralment with a religious 
zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never 
yet heard attributed to any other man — have untwisted, 
almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fet- 
tered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be 

10 set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self- 
indulgence, Not to insist, that in my case, the self- 
conquest was unquestionable, the self-indulgence open 
to doubts of casuistry, according as that name shall be 
extended to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or 

1 5 shall be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of 
positive pleasure. 

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge : and, if I 
did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the 
present act of confession, in consideration of the ser- 

20 vice which I may thereby render to the whole class 
of opium-eaters. But who are they ? Keader, I am 
sorry to say, a very numerous class indeed. Of this 
I became convinced some years ago, by computing, at 
that time, the number of those in one small class of 

25 English society (the class of men distinguished for 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 5 

talents, or of eminent station), who were known to 
me, directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters; such for 
instance, as the eloquent and benevolent [° William 
Wilberforce] ; the late °Dean of [Carlisle] ; °Lord [Ers- 

kine] ; °Mr. , the philosopher ; a late °Under-Sec- 5 

retary of State (who described to me the sensation 
which first drove him to the use of opiuii, in the very 
same words as the Dean of [Carlisle], viz. "that he 
felt as though rats were gnawing and abrading the 
coats of his stomach"); °Mr. [Coleridge]; and many 10 
others, hardly less known, whom it would be tedious 
to mention. Now, if one class, comparatively so 
limited, could furnish so many scores of cases (and 
that within the knowledge of one single inqiurer), it 
was a natural inference, that the entire population of 15 
England would furnish a proportionable number. The 
soundness of this inference, however, I doubted, until 
some facts became known to me, which satisfied me, 
that it was not incorrect. I will mention two: 1. Three 
respectable London druggists, in widely remote quarters 20 
of London, from whom I happened lately to be purchas- 
ing small quantities of opium, assured me, that the num- 
ber of amateur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was, 
at this time, immense ; and that the difficulty of dis- 
tinguishing those persons, to whom habit had rendered 25 



6 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

opium necessary, from such as were purchasing it with 
a view to suicide, occasioned 'them daily trouble and 
disputes. This evidence respected London only. But, 
2. (which will possibly surprise the reader more,) 
some years ago, on passing through Manchester, I was 
informed by several cotton manufacturers, that their 
workpeople were rapidly getting into the practice of 
opium-eating; so much so, that on a Saturday after- 
noon the counters of the druggists were strewed with 
pills of one, two, or three grains, in preparation for 
the known demand of the evening. The immediate 
occasion of this practice was the lowness of wages, 
which, at that time, would not allow them to indulge 
in ale or spirits : and, wages rising, it may be thought 
that this practice would cease : but, as I do not readily 
believe that any man, having once tasted the divine 
luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the 
gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it 
for granted, 

°That those eat now, who never ate before ; 
And those who always ate, now eat the more. 

Indeed the fascinating powers of opium are ad- 
mitted, even by medical writers, who are its greatest 
enemies: thus, for instance, °Awsiter, apothecary to 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 7 

Greenwich-hospital, in his "Essay on the Effects of 
Opium " (published in the year 1763), when attempt- 
ing to explain, why °Mead had not been sufficiently 
explicit on the properties, counteragents, &c. of this 
drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious 
terms {° (juavavra crvveTOKTi) : " perhaps he thought the 
subject of too delicate a nature to be made common; 
and as many people might then indiscriminately use 
it, it would take from that necessary fear and caution, 
which should prevent their experiencing the extensive 
power of this drug : for there are many properties in it, 
if universally known, that would hdhituate the use, and 
make it more in request with 2ts than the Turks them- 
selves: the result of which knowledge," he adds, 
"must prove a general misfortune." In the neces- 
sity of this conclusion I do not altogether concur: 
but upon that point I shall have occasion to speak at 
the close of my confessions, where I shall present the 
reader with the moral of my narrative. 

PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 

These preliminary confessions, or introductory narra- 
tive of the youthful adventures which laid the founda- 
tion of the writer's habit of opium-eating in after-life. 



8 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

it has been judged proper to premise, for three several 
reasons : 

1. As forestalling that question, and giving it a sat- 
isfactory answer, which else Avould painfully obtrude 
5 itself in the course of the Opium Confessions — " How 
came any reasonable being to subject himself to such 
a yoke of misery, voluntarily to incur a captivity so 
servile, and knowingly to fetter himself with such a 
sevenfold chain ? " — a question which, if not some- 

lo where plausibly resolved, could hardly fail, by the in- 
dignation which it would be apt to raise as against an 
act of wanton folly, to interfere with that degree of 
sympathy which is necessary in any case to an author's 
purposes. 

15 2, As furnishing a key to some parts of that tremen- 
dous scenery which afterwards peopled the dreams of 
the Opium-eater. 

3. As creating some previous interest of a personal 
sort in the confessing subject, apart from the matter of 

20 the confessions, which cannot fail to render the confes- 
sions themselves more interesting. If a man °" whose 
talk is of oxen," should become an Opium-eater, the 
probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream 
at all) — he will dream about oxen: whereas, in the 

25 case before him, the reader will lind that the Opium- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 9 

eater boasteth himself to be a jjliilosopher ; and accord- 
ingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking 
or sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to 
one who, in that character, 

°Humani nihil a se aHeniim putat. 

Eor amongst the conditions which he deems indis- 
pensable to the sustaining of any claim to the title of 
philosopher, is not merely the possession of a superb 
intellect in its analytic functions (in which part of 
the pretention, however, England can for some gen- 
erations show but few claimants ; at least, he is not 
aware of any known candidate for this honour who 
can be styled emphatically a subtle thinker, with the 
exception of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in a nar- 
rower department of thought, with the recent illustri- 
ous exception of ° David Eicardo) — but also on such 
a constitution of the moral faculties as shall give him 
an °inner eye and power of intuition for the vision 
and the mysteries of our human nature : that consti- 
tution of faculties, in short, which (amongst all the 
generations of men that from the beginning of time 
have deployed into life, as it were, upon this planet) 
our English poets have possessed in the highest degree 
— and "Scottish professors in the lowest. 



10 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

I have often been asked how I first came to be a 
regular opium-eater; and have suffered, very unjustly, 
in the oi:>inion of my acquaintance, from being reputed 
to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which 
I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence 
in this practice, purely for the sake of creating an 
artificial state of pleasurable excitement. This, how- 
ever, is a misrepresentation of iny case. True it is, 
that for nearly ten years I did occasionally take 
opium, for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave 
me : but so long as I took it with this view, I was 
effectually protected from all material bad conse- 
quences by the necessity of interposing long intervals 
between the several acts of indulgence, in order to 
renew the pleasurable sensations. It was not for the 
purpose of creating pleasure, but of mitigating pain 
in the severest degree, that I first began to use opium 
as an article of daily diet. In the twenty-eighth year 
of my age, °a most painful affection of the stomach, 
which I had first experienced about ten years before, 
attacked me in great strength. This affection had 
originally been caused by extremities of hunger, suf- 
fered in my boyish days. During the season of hope 
and redundant happiness which succeeded (that is, 
from eighteen to twenty-four) it had slumbered : for 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 11 

the three following years it had revived at intervals: 
and now, under unfavourable circumstances, from 
depression of spirits, it attacked me with a violence 
that yielded to no remedies but opium. As the youth- 
ful sufferings, which first produced this derangement 
of the stomach, were interesting in themselves, and in 
the circumstances that attended them, I shall here 
briefly retrace them. 

My father died, when I was about seven j^ears old, 
and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent 
to various schools, great and small ; and was very 
early distinguished for my classical attainments, espe- 
cially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen, I 
wrote Greek with ease ; and at fifteen my command 
of that language was so great, that I not only com- 
posed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse 
in Greek fluently and without embarrassment — an 
accomplishment which I have not since met with in 
any scholar of my times, and Avhich, in my case, was 
owing to the practice of daily reading off the news- 
papers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore : 
for the necessity of ransacking my memory and inven- 
tion, for all sorts and combinations of x^eriphrastic 
expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, 
relations of things, &c. gave me a compass of diction 



12 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

which woukl never have been called out by a dull 
translation of moral essays, &c. ''That boy," said 
one of my masters, pointing the attention of a stranger 
to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, 
better than you and I could address an English one." 
He who honoured me with this eulogy, was a "scholar, 
" and a °ripe and a good one : " and of all my tutors, 
was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Un- 
fortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to 
this worthy man's great indignation), I was trans- 
ferred to the care, first of a "blockhead, who was in 
a x)erpetual panic, lest I should expose his ignorance ; 
and finally, to that of a "respectable scholar, at the 
head of a great school on an ancient foundation. 
This man had been appointed to his situation by 
[Brasenose] College, Oxford ; and was a sound, well- 
built scholar, but (like most men, whom I have known 
from that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A 
miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the 
Etonian brilliancy of my favourite master : and be- 
sides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice, 
the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It 
is a bad thing for a boy to be, and to know himself, 
far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or in 
power of mind. This was the case, so far as regarded 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATEJR 13 

knowledge at least, not with myself only : for the 
two boys, who jointly with myself composed the first 
form, were better Grecians than the head-master, 
though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more 
accustomed to °sacrifice to the graces. When I first 
entered, I remember that we read °Sophocles ; and it 
was a constant matter of triumph to us, the learjied 
triumvirate of the first form, to see our °'Archididas- 
calus ' (as he loved to be called) conning our lessons 
before we went up, and laying a regular train, with 
lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and blasting (as 
it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses ; 
whilst we never condescended to open our books, until 
the moment of going up, and were generally employed 
in writing °epigranis upon his wig, or some such im- 
portant matter. My two class-fellows were poor, and 
dependant for their future prospects at the university, 
on the recommendation of the head-master: but I, 
who had a small patrimonial property, the income of 
which was sufficient to support me at college, wished 
to be sent thither immediately. I made earnest rep- 
resentations on the subject to my guardians, but all 
to no purpose. One, who was more reasonable, and 
had more knowledge of the world than the rest, lived 
at a distance : two of the other three resigned all their 



14 CONFESSIOJVS OF AN 

authority into the hands of the fourth ; and this fourth 
with whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, in 
his way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant of all 
opposition to his will. After a certain number of 

5 letters and personal interviews, I found that I had 
nothing to hope for, not even a compromise of the 
matter, from my guardian: unconditional submission 
was what he demanded : and I prepared myself, 
therefore, for other measures. Summer was now com- 

lo ing on with hasty steps, and my seventeenth birth- 
day was fast approaching; after which day I had 
sworn within myself, that I would no longer be num- 
bered amongst schoolboys. Money being what I chiefly 
wanted, I wrote to a °woman of high rank, who, 

5 though young herself, had known me from a child, 
and had latterly treated me with great distinction, 
requesting that she would ' lend ' me five guineas. 
For upwards of a week no answer came ; and I was 
beginning to despond, when, at length, a servant put 

:o into my hands a double letter, with a coronet on the 
seal. The letter was kind and obliging: the fair 
writer was on the sea-coast, and in that way the delay 
had arisen : she enclosed double of what I had asked, 
and good-naturedly hinted, that if I should never re- 

15 pay her, it would not absolutely rtdn her. Now then. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 15 

I was prepared for my scheme : ten guineas, added 
to about two which I had remaining from my pocket 
money, seemed to me sufficient for an indefinite length 
of time : and at that happy age, if no definite boun- 
dary can be assigned to one's power, the spirit of hope 5 
and pleasure makes it virtuall}'' infinite. 

It is a °just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and what 
cannot often be said of his remarks, it is a very feel- 
ing one), that we never do anything consciously for 
the last time (of things, that is, which we have long 10 
been in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart. 
This truth I felt deeply, when I came to leave [Man- 
chester], a place which I did not love, and where I 
had not been happy. On the evening before I left 
[Manchester] for ever, I grieved when the ancient 15 
and lofty schoolroom resounded with the evening ser- 
vice, performed for the last time in my hearing; and 
at night, when the muster-roll of names was called 
over, and mine (as usual) was called first, I stepped 
forward, and, passing the head-master, who was stand- 20 
ing by, I bowed to him, and looked earnestly in his 
face, thinking to myself, ' He is old and infirm, and 
in this world I shall not see him again.' I was right : 
I never did see him again, nor ever shall. He looked 
at me complacently, smiled goodnaturedly, returned 25 



16 COIiFESSIONS OF AN 

my salutation (or rather, my valediction), and we 
parted (though he knew it not) for ever. I could not 
reverence him intellectually: but he had been uni- 
formly kind to me, and had allowed me many indul- 
5 gencies : and I grieved at the thought of the mortifica- 
tion I should inflict upon him. 

The morning came, which was to launch me into 
the world, and from which my whole succeeding life 
has, in many important points, taken its colouring. I 
10 lodged in the head-master's house, and had been al- 
lowed, from my first entrance, the indulgence of a 
private room, which I used both as a sleeping room 
and as a study. At half after three I rose, and gazed 
with deep emotion at the ancient towers of [the col- 
15 legiate church], °' drest in earliest light,' and beginning 
to crimson with the radiant lustre of a cloudless July 
morning. I was firm and immovable in my purpose : 
but yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger 
and troubles ; and, if I could have foreseen the hurri- 
20 cane, and perfect hail-storm of affliction which soon 
fell upon me, well might I have been agitated. To 
this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented 
an affecting contrast, and in some degree a medicine. 
The silence was more profound than that of mid- 
25 night : and to me the silence of a summer morning 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 17 

is more toucliing than all other silence, because, the 
light being broad and strong, as that of noon-day at 
other seasons of the year, it seems to differ from per- 
fect day, chiefly because man is not yet abroad ; and 
thus, the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures 5 
of God, seems to be secure and deep, only so long as 
the presence of man, and his restless and unquiet 
spirit, are not there to trouble its sanctity. I dressed 
myself, took my hat and gloves, and lingered a little 
in the room. For the last year and a half this room ic 
had been my °' pensive citadel' : here I had read and 
studied through all the hours of night: and, though 
true it was, that for the latter part of this time I, who 
was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my 
gaiety and happiness, during the strife and fever of 15 
contention with my guardian; yet, on the other hand, 
as a boy, so passionately fond of books, and °dedicated 
to intellectual ]3ursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed 
many happy hours in the midst of general dejection. 
I wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth, writ- 2c 
ing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing too cer- 
tainly, that I looked upon them for the last time. 
Whilst I write this, it is eighteen years ago ; and 
yet, at this moment, I see distinctly as if it were 
yesterday, the lineaments and expression of the object 25 



18 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

on which I fixed my parting gaze : it was a picture of 

the °lovely , which hung over the mantelpiece; the 

eyes and mouth of which were so beautiful, and the 
whole countenance so radiant with benignity, and di- 
5 vine tranquillity, that I had a thousand times laid 
down my pen, or my book, to gather consolation from 
it, as a devotee from his patron saint. Whilst I was 
yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of [Manchester] 
clock proclaimed that it was four o'clock. I went up 
10 to the picture, kissed it, and then gently walked out 
and closed the door for ever ! 

°So blended and intertwisted in this life are occa- 
sions of laughter and of tears, that I cannot yet recal, 
without smiling, an incident which occurred at that 

15 time, and which had nearly put a stop to the im- 
mediate execution of my plan. I had a trunk of 
immense weight ; for, besides my clothes, it contained 
nearly all my library. The difficulty was to get this re- 
moved to a carrier's : my room was at an aerial eleva- 

20 tion in the house, and (what was worse) the staircase, 
which communicated with this angle of the building, 
was accessible only by a gallery, which passed the 
head-master's chamber door. I was a favourite with 
all the servants ; and, knowing that any of them would 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 19 

screen me, and act confidentially, I communicated 
my embarrassment to a groom of the head-master's. 
The groom swore he would do anything I wished; and, 
when the time arrived, went uj) stairs to bring the 
trunk down. This I feared was beyond the strength 5 
of any one man : however, the groom was a man — 

°0f Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; 

and had a back as spacious as "Salisbury plain. Ac- 
cordingly he persisted in bringing down the trunk 10 
alone, whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last 
flight, in anxiety for the event. For some time I 
heard him descending with slow and firm steps : but, 
unfortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near 
the dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the 15 
gallery, his foot slipped ; and the inighty burden 
falling from his shoulders, gained such increase of 
impetus at each step of the descent, that, on reaching 
the bottom, it trundled, or rather leaped, right across, 
with the noise of twenty devils, against the very bed- 20 
room door of the archididascalus. My first thought 
was, that all was lost ; and that my only chance for 
executing a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. How- 
ever, on reflection, I determined to abide the issue. 



20 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

The groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own 
account and on mine : but, in spite of this, so irre- 
sistibly had the sense of the ludicrous, in this un- 
happy °contretems, taken possession of his fancy, that 
5 he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laugh- 
ter, that might have wakened the °Seven Sleepers. 
At the sound of this resonant merriment, within the 
very ears of insulted authority, I could not myself 
forbear joining in it: subdued to this, not so much by 

10 the unhappy °etourderie of the trunk, as by the~effect 
it had upon the groom. We both expected, as a 
matter of course, that Dr. [Law son] would sally out 
of his room: for, in general, if but a mouse stirred, 
he sprang out like a mastiff from his kennel. 

15 Strange to say, however, on this occasion, when the 
noise of laughter had ceased, no sound, or rustling 
even, was to be heard in the bedroom. Dr. [Lawson] 
had a painful complaint, which, sometimes keeping 
him awake, made his sleep, perhaps, when it did 

20 come, the deeper. Gathering courage from the silence, 
the groom hoisted his burden again, and accomplished 
the remainder of his descent without accident, I 
waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheel- 
barrow, and on its road to the carrier's : then, °' with 

25 Providence my guide/ I set off on foot, — carrying a 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 21 

small parcel, with some articles of dress, under my 
arm; °a favourite English poet in one pocket; and 
a small 12mo. volume, containing about nine plays of 
°Euripides, in the other. 

It had been my intention originally to proceed to 
Westmoreland, both from the love I bore to that coun- 
try, and on other "personal accounts. "Accident, how- 
ever, gave a different direction to my wanderings, and 
I bent my steps towards North Wales. 

After wandering about for some time in Denbigh- 
shire, Merionethshire, and Carnarvonshire, I took 
lodgings in a small neat house in B[angor]. Here I 
might have stayed with great comfort for many weeks ; 
for, provisions were cheap at B[angor], from the scar- 
city of other markets for the surplus produce of a wide 
agricultural district. An accident, however, in which, 
perhaps, no offence was designed, drove me out to 
wander again. I know not whether my reader may 
have remarked, but / have often remarked, that the 
proudest class of people in England (or at any rate, 
the class whose pride is most apparent) are the fami- 
lies of bishops. Noblemen, and their children, carry 
about with them, in their very titles, a sufficient noti- 
fication of their rank. Nay, their very names (and 
this applies also to the children of many untitled 



22 coNFi!:ssi(jNS of an 

houses) are often, to the English ear, adequate expo- 
nents of high birth, or descent. Sackville, Manners, 
Fitzroy, Paulet, Cavendish, and scores of others, tell 
their own tale. Such persons, therefore, find every- 

5 where a due sense of their claims already established, 
except among those who are ignorant of the world, by 
virtue of their own obscurity : °' Not to know them, 
argues one's self unknown.' Their manners take a 
suitable tone and colouring; and, for once that they 

10 find it necessary to impress a sense of their conse- 
quence upon others, they meet with a thousand occa- 
sions for moderating and tempering this sense by acts 
of courteous condescension. With the families of 
bishops it is otherwise: with them it is all up-hill 

15 work, to make known their pretensions: for the pro- 
portion of the episcopal bench, taken from noble fami- 
lies, is not at any time very large ; and the succession 
to these dignities is so rapid, that the public ear sel- 
dom has time to become familiar with them, unless 

20 where they are connected with some literary reputa- 
tion. Hence it is, that the children of bishops carry 
about with them an austere and repulsive air, indica- 
tive of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of 
°noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too 

25 familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitive- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 23 

ness of a gouty man, from all contact with the °ol iroX- 
\oL. Doubtless, a powerful understanding, or unusual 
goodness of nature, will preserve a man from such 
weakness : but, in general, the truth of my representa- 
tion will be acknowledged: pride, if not of deeper 5 
root in such families, appears, at least, more upon the 
surface of their manners. This spirit of manners 
naturally cominunicates itself to their domestics, and 
other dependants. Now, my landlady had been a 
lady's maid, or a nurse, in the family of the Bishop 10 
of [Bangor] ; and had but lately married away and 
'settled' (as such people express it) for life. In a 
little town like B[angor], merely to have lived in the 
bishop's family, conferred some distinction : and my 
good landlady had rather more than her share of the 15 
pride I have noticed on that score. What ' my lord ' 
said, and what ' my lord ' did, how useful he was in 
parliament, and how indispensable at Oxford, formed 
the daily burden of her talk. All this I bore very 
well : for I was too good-natured to laugh in anybody's 20 
face, and I could make an ample allowance for the 
garrulity of an old servant. Of necessity, however, I 
must have appeared in her eyes very inadequately 
impressed with the bishop's importance : and, per- 
haps, to punish me for my indifference, or possibly by 25 



24 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

accident, she one day repeated to me a conversation in 
which I was indirectly a party concerned. She had 
been to the palace to pay her respects to the family ; 
and, dinner being over, was summoned into the dining- 

5 room. In giving an account of her household econ- 
omy, she happened to mention, that she had let her 
apartments. Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) 
had taken occasion to caution her as to her selection 
of inmates : ' for,' said he, ' you must recollect, Betty, 

lo that this place is in the high road to the Head ; so that 
multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their 
debts into England — and of English swindlers, run- 
ning away from their debts to the Isle of Man, are 
likely to take this place in their route.' This advice 

15 was certainly not without reasonable grounds : but 
rather fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty's private 
meditations, than specially reported to me. What 
followed, however, was somewhat worse : — ' Oh, my 
lord,' answered my landlady (according to her own 

20 representation of the matter), ^I really don't think 

this young gentleman is a swiudler ; because ' : 

' You don't think me a swindler ? ' said I, interrupting 
her, in a tumult of indignation : ' for the future I shall 
spare you the trouble of tliinking about it.' And with- 

35 out delay I prepared for my departure. Some conces- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 25 

sions the good woman seemed disposed to make : but 
a harsh and contemptuous expression, which I fear 
that I applied to the learned dignitary himself, roused 
her indignation in turn : and reconciliation then became 
impossible. I was, indeed, greatly irritated at the 5 
bishop's having suggested any grounds of suspicion, 
however remotely, against a person whom he had never 
seen : and I thought of letting him know my mind in 
Greek : which, at the same time that it would furnish 
some presumption that I was no swindler, would also 10 
(I hoped) compel the bishop to reply in the same lan- 
guage ; in which case, I doubted not to make it appear, 
that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a far 
better Grecian. Calmer thoughts, however, drove this 
boyish design out of my mind: for I considered, that 15 
the bishop was in the right to counsel an old servant ; 
that he could not have designed that his advice should 
be reported to me; and that the same coarseness of 
mind, which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice 
at all, might have coloured it in a way more agreeable 20 
to her own style of thinking, than to the actual expres- 
sions of the worthy bishop. 

I left the lodgings the very same hour; and this 
turned out a very unfortunate occurrence for me : 
because, living henceforward at inns, I was drained of 25 



26 CONFIJSSIONS OF AN 

my money very rapidly. In a fortnight I was reduced 
to short allowance ; that is, I could allow myself only 
one meal a-day. From the keen appetite produced 
by constant exercise, and mountain air, acting on a 
5 youthful stomach, I soon began to suffer greatly on 
this slender regimen; for the single meal, which I 
could venture to order, was coffee or tea. Even this, 
however, was at length withdrawn : and afterwards, 
so long as I remained in Wales, I subsisted either on 

lo blackberries, hips, haws, &c. or on the casual hospi- 
** talities which I now and then received, in return for 
such little services as I had an opportunity of render- 
ing. Sometimes I wrote letters of business for cot- 
tagers, who happened to have relatives in Liverpool, 

15 or in London : more often I wrote love-letters to their 
sweethearts for young women who had lived as ser- 
vants at Shrewsbury, or other towns on the English 
border. On all such occasions I gave great satisfac- 
tion to my humble friends, and was generally treated 

20 with hospitality : and once, in particular, near the 
village of Llan-y-styndw (or some such name), in a 
sequestered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained 
for upwards of three days by a family of young people, 
with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left 

25 an impression upon my heart not yet impaired. The 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 27 

family consisted, at that time, of four sisters, and three 
brothers, all grown up, and all remarkable for elegance 
and delicacy of manners. So much beauty, and so 
much native good-breeding and refinement, I do not 
remember to have seen before or since in any cottage, 5 
except once or twice in "Westmoreland and Devon- 
shire. They spoke English: an accomplishment not 
often met with in so many members of one family, 
especially in villages remote from the high-road. 
Here I wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about 10 
prize-money, for one of the brothers, who had served 
on board an English man of war; and more privately, 
two love-letters for two of the sisters. They were 
both interesting looking girls, and one of uncommon 
loveliness. In the midst of their confusion and blushes, 15 
whilst dictating, or rather giving me general instruc- 
tions, it did not require any great penetration to dis- 
cover that what they wished was, that their letters 
should be as kind as was consistent with proper 
maidenly pride. I contrived so to temper my ex- 20 
pressions, as to reconcile the gratification of both 
feelings: and they were as much pleased with the 
way in which I had expressed their thoughts, as (in 
their simplicity) they were astonished at my having 
so readily discovered them. The reception one meets 25 



28 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

with from the women pf a family, generally deter- 
mines the tenor of one's whole entertainment. In 
this case, I had discharged my confidential duties as 
secretary, so much to the general satisfaction, per- 
5 haps also amusing them with my conversation, that I 
was pressed to stay with a cordiality which I had 
little inclination to resist. I slept with the brothers, 
the only unoccupied bed standing in the apartment 
of the young women: but in all other points they 

10 treated me with a respect not usually paid to purses 
as light as mine; as if my scholarship were suffi- 
cient evidence that I was of " gentle blood." Thus 
I lived with them for three days, and great part of 
a fourth : and, from the undiminished kindness which 

15 they continued to show me, I believe! might have 
staid with them up to this time, if their power had 
corresponded with their wishes. On the last morn- 
ing, however, I perceived upon their countenances, 
as they sate at breakfast, the expression of some un- 

20 pleasant communication which was at hand ; and soon 
after one of the brothers explained to me that their 
parents had gone, the day before my arrival, to an 
annual meeting of Methodists, held at Carnarvon, and 
were that day expected to return ; " and if they should 

25 not be so civil as they ought to be," he begged, on the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 29 

part of all the young people, that I would not take it 
amiss. The parents returned, with churlish faces, and 
" Dym Sassenach " (no English), in answer to all my 
addresses. I saw how matters stood ; and so, taking 
an affectionate leave of my kind and interesting young 5 
hosts, I went my way. For, though they spoke warmly 
to their parents in my behalf, and often excused the 
manner of the old people, by saying, that it was " only 
their way," yet I easily understood that my talent 
for writing love-letters would do as little to recom- 10 
mend me with - two grave sexagenarian Welsh Metho- 
dists, as my Greek °Sapphics or Alcaics : and what had 
been hospitality when offered to me with the gracious 
courtesy of my young friends, would become charity, 
when connected with the harsh demeanour of these 15 
old people. Certainly, °Mr. Shelley is right in his 
notions about old age : unless powerfully counteracted 
by all sorts of opposite agencies, it is a miserable cor- 
rupter and blighter to the genial charities of the 
human heart. 20 

Soon after this, I contrived, by °means which I must 
omit for want of room, to transfer myself to London. 
And now began the latter and fiercer stage of my 
long sufferings ; without using a disproportionate 
expression, I might say, of my agony. For I now 25 



30 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

suffered, for upwards of sixteen Aveeks, the physical 
anguish of hunger in various degrees of intensity ; 
but as bitter, perhaps, as ever any human being can 
have suffered who has survived it. I v/ould not need- 
5 lessly harass my reader's feelings, by a detail of all 
that I endured : for extremities such as these, under 
any circumstances of heaviest misconduct or guilt, can- 
not be contemplated, even in description, without a 
rueful pity that is painful to the natural goodness 

lo of the human heart. Let it suffice, at least on this 
occasion, to say, that a few fragments of bread from 
the breakfast-table of one individual (who supposed 
me to be ill, but did not know of my being in utter 
want), and these at uncertain intervals, constituted 

15 my whole support. During the former part of my 
sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and always for 
the first two months in London) I was houseless, and 
very seldom slept under a roof. To this constant 
exjjosure to the open air I ascribe it mainly, that I 

20 did not sink under my torments. Latterly, however, 
when colder and more inclement weather came on, 
and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had 
begun to sink into a more languishing condition, it 
was, no doubt, fortunate for me, that the same person 

25 to whose breakfast-table I had access, allowed me to 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 31 

sleep in a large unoccupied house, of which he was 
tenant. Unoccupied, I call it, for there was no house- 
hold or establishment in it ; nor any furniture, indeed, 
except a table, and a few chairs. But I found, on 
taking possession of my new quarters, that the house 5 
already contained one single inmate, a poor friendless 
child, apparently ten years old; but she seemed 
hunger-bitten ; and sufferings of that sort often make 
children look older than they are. From this forlorn 
child I learned, that she had slept and lived there 10 
alone, for some time before T came : and great joy 
the poor creature expressed, when she found that I 
was, in future, to be her companion through the hours 
of darkness. The house was large; and, from the 
want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a pro- 15 
digious echoing on the spacious stair-case and hall ; 
and, amidst the real fleshly ills of cold, and, I fear, 
hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer 
still more (it appeared) -from the self-created one of 
ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts 20 
whatsoever: but, alas! I could offer her no other 
assistance. We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of 
cursed law papers for a pillow : but with no other 
covering than a sort of large horseman's cloak : after- 
wards, however, we discovered, in a garret, an old 25 



32 coNFI:ssIO^'s of an 

sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments 
of other articles, which added a little to our warmth. 
The poor child crept close to me for warmth, and for 
security against her ghostly enemies. When I was 
5 not more than usually ill, I took her into my arms, so 
that, in general, she was tolerably warm, and often 
slept when I could not: for, during the last two 
months of my sufferings, I slept much in day-time, 
and was apt to fall into transient dozings at all hours. 

10 But my sleep distressed me more than my watching : 
for, besides the tumultuousness of my dreams (which 
were only not so awful as those which I shall have to 
describe hereafter as produced by opium), my sleep 
was never more than what is called dog-sleep ; so that 

T5 I could hear myself moaning, and was often, as it 
seemed to me, wakened suddenly by my own voice ; 
and, about this time, a hideous sensation began to 
haunt me as soon as I fell into a slumber, which 
has since returned upon me, at different periods of 

2o my life, viz. a sort of twitching (I know not where, 
but apparently about the region of. the stomach), 
which compelled me violently to throw out my feet 
for the sake of relieving it. This sensation coming 
on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to relieve 

25 it constantly awaking me, at length I slept only from 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER S3 

exhaustion; and from increasing weakness (as I said 
before) I was constantly falling asleep, and constantly 
awaking. Meantime, the master of the house some- 
times came in upon us suddenly, and very early, some- 
times not till ten o'clock, sometimes not at all. He 5 
was in constant fear of bailiffs: improving on °the 
plan of Cromwell, every night he slept in a different 
quarter of London ; and I observed that he never 
failed to examine, through a private window, the 
appearance of those who knocked at the door, before 10 
he would allow it to be opened. . He breakfasted 
alone: indeed, his tea equipage would hardly have 
admitted of his hazarding an invitation to a second 
person — any more than the quantity of esculent 
materiel, which, for the most part, was little more 15 
than a roll, or a few biscuits, which he had bought 
on his road from the place where he had slept. Or, 
if he had asked a party, as I once learnedly and face- 
tiously observed to him — the several members of it 
must have stood in the relation to each other (not sate 20 
in any relation whatever) of succession, as the meta- 
physicians have it, and not of a co-existence; in the 
relation of the parts of time, and not of the parts of 
space. During his breakfast, I generally contrived 
a reason for lounging in ; and, with an air of as much 25 

D 



34 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

indilference as I could assume, took up such fragmeuts 
as he had left — sometimes, indeed, there were none 
at all. In doing this, I committed no robbery except 
upon the man himself, who was thus obliged (I believe) 
5 now and then to send out at noon for an extra biscuit; 
for, as to the poor child, she was never admitted into 
his study (if I may give that name to his chief deposi- 
tory of parchments, law writings, &c.); that room 
was to her the °Blue-beard room of the house, being 

xo regularly locked on his departure to dinner, about six 
o'clock, which usually was his final departure for the 
night. ° Whether this child were an illegitimate 
daughter of Mr. [Brunellj, or only a servant, I could 
not ascertain; she did not herself know; but cer- 

15 tainly she was treated altogether as a menial servant. 
No sooner did Mr. [Brunell] make his appearance, than 
she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, &c. ; 
and, except when she was summoned to run an 
errand, she never emerged from the dismal °Tartarus 

20 of the kitchens, &c. to the upper air, until my welcome 
knock at night called up her little trembling footsteps 
to the front door. Of her life during the daytime, 
however, I knew little but what I gathered from her 
own account at night; for, as soon as the hours of 

25 business commenced, I saw that my absence would 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 35 

be acceptable; and, in general, therefore, I went off 
and sate in the parks, or elsewhere, until nightfall. 

But who, and what, meantime, was the master of the 
house himself ? Reader, he was one of those anoma- 
lous practitioners in lower departments of the law, who 
— what shall I say ? — who, on prudential reasons, or 
from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in the 
luxury of too delicate a conscience : (a periphrasis which 
might be abridged considerably, but that I leave to the 
reader's taste : ) in many walks of life, a conscience is 
a more expensive encumbrance, than a wife or a car- 
riage ; and just as people talk of °" laying down " their 
carriages, so I suppose my friend, Mr. [Brunell] had 
" laid down " his conscience for a time ; meaning, doubt- 
less, to resume it as soon as he could afford it. The 
inner economy of such a man's daily life would present 
a most strange picture, if I could allow myself to amuse 
the reader at his expense. Even with my limited oppor- 
tunities for observing what went on, I saw many scenes 
of London intrigues, and complex chicanery, °" cycle 
and epicycle, orb in orb," at which I sometimes smile 
to this day — and at which I smiled then, in spite of my 
misery. My situation, however, at that time, gave me 
little experience, in my own person, of any qualities 
in Mr. [BrunellJ's character but such as did him hon- 



36 CONFESSIONS OF AK 

our; and of his whole strange composition, I must 
forget everything but that towards me he was obliging, 
and, to the extent of his power, generous. 

That power was not, indeed, very extensive ; how- 
5 ever, in common with the rats, I sate rent free; and, 
as °Dr. Johnson has recorded, that he never but once 
in his life had as much wall-fruit as he could eat, so 
let me be grateful, that on that single occasion I had 
as large a choice of apartments in a London mansion 

10 as I could possibly desire. Except the Blue-beard room, 
which the poor child believed to be haunted, all others, 
from the attics to the cellars, were at our service ; °" the 
world was all before us ; " and we pitched our tent for 
the night in any spot we chose. This house I have 

15 already described as a large one; it stands in a con- 
spicuous situation, and in a well-known part of Lon- 
don. Many of my readers will have passed it, I doubt 
not, within a few hours of reading this. For myself, 
I never fail to visit it when business draws me to Lon- 

20 don ; about ten o'clock, this very night, August 15, 1821, 
being my birth-day — I turned aside from my evening 
walk, down Oxford-street, purposely to take a glance 
at it : it is now occupied by a respectable family ; and, 
by the lights in the front drawing-room, I observed a 

25 domestic party, assembled perhaps at tea, and appar- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 37 

ently cheerful and gay. Marvellous contrast in my 
eyes to the darkness — cold — silence — and desola- 
tion of that same house "eighteen years ago, when its 
nightly occupants were one famishing scholar, and a 
neglected child. — Her, by the bye, in after years, I 5 
vainly endeavoured to trace. Apart from her situation, 
she was not what would be called an interesting child : 
she was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, nor 
remarkably pleasing in manners. But, thank God! 
even in those years I needed not the embellishments 10 
of novel-accessaries to conciliate my affections ; plain 
human nature, in its humblest and most homely apparel, 
was enough for me : and I loved the child because she 
was my partner in wretchedness. If she is now living, 
she is probably a mother, with children of her own ; but, 15 
as I have said, I could never trace her. 

This I regret, but another person there was at that 
time, whom I have since sought to trace with far 
deeper earnestness, and with far deeper sorrow at my 
failure. This person was a young woman, and one 20 
of that unhappy class who subsist upon the wages of 
prostitution. I feel no shame, nor have any reason 
to feel it, in avowing, that I was then on familiar and 
friendly terms with many women in that unfortunate 
condition. The reader needs neither smile at this 25 



38 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

avowal, nor frown. For, not to remind my classical 
readers of the old Latin proverb — °' Sine Cerere,' &c., 
it may well be supposed that in the existing state of 
my purse, my connection with such women could not 
5 have been an impure one. °But the truth is, that at 
no time of my life have I been a person to hold myself 
polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that 
wore a human shape : on the contrary, from my very 
earliest youth it has been my pride to converse famil- 

10 iarly, °more Socratico, with all human beings, man, 
woman, and child, that chance might fling in my 
way : a i:>ractice which is friendly to the knowledge of 
human nature, to good feelings, and to that frankness 
of address which becomes a man who would be thought 

15 a philosopher. For a philosopher should not see with 
the eyes of the °poor limitary creature calling himself 
a man of the world, and filled with narrow and self- 
regarding prejudices of birth and education, but should 
look upon himself as a Catholic creature, and as stand- 

20 ing in equal relation to high and low — to educated 
and uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent. Be- 
ing myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or 
a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more fre- 
quently with those female peripatetics who are tech- 

25 nically called Street-walkers. Many of these women 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 39 

had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who 
wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I was 
sitting. But one amongst them, the one on whose 
account I have at all introduced this subject — yet 

no ! let me not class thee, Oh noble-minded Ann , 5 

with that order of women ; let me find, if it be pos- 
sible, some gentler name to designate the condition of 
her to whose bounty and compassion, ministering to 
my necessities when all the world had forsaken me, 
I owe it that I am at this time alive. — For many 10 
weeks I had walked at nights with this poor friend- 
less girl up and down Oxford Street, or had rested 
with her on steps and under the shelter of porticos. 
She could not be so old as myself: she told me, 
indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth year. 15 
By such questions as my interest about her prompted, 
I had gradually drawn forth her simple history. 
Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence (as I have 
since had reason to think), and one in which, if Lon- 
don beneficence had better adapted its arrangements 20 
to meet it, the power of the law might oftener be 
interposed to protect, and to avenge. But the stream 
of London charity flows in a channel which, though 
deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and underground ; 
not obvious or readily accessible to poor houseless 25 



40 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

wanderers : and it cannot be denied that the outside 
air and framework of London society is harsh, cruel, 
and repuLsive. In any case, however, I saw that part 
of her injuries might easily have been redressed : and 

5 I urged her often and earnestly to lay her complaint 
before a magistrate : friendless as she was, I assured 
her that she would meet with immediate attention ; 
and that English justice, which was no respecter of 
persons, would speedily and amply avenge her on the 

10 brutal ruffian who had plundered her little property. 
She promised me often that she would ; but she 
delayed taking the steps I pointed out from time to 
time: for she. was timid and dejected to a degree 
which showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of 

15 her young heart; and perhaps she thought justly that 
the most upright judge, and the most righteous tribu- 
nals, could do nothing to repair her heaviest wrongs. 
Something, however, would perhaps have been done: 
for it had been settled between us at length, but 

20 unhappily on the very last time but one that I was 
ever to see her, that in a day or two we should go 
together before a magistrate, and that I should speak 
on her behalf. This little service it was destined, 
however, that I should never realise. Meantime, that 

25 which she rendered to me, and which was greater than 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 41 

I could ever have repaid her, was this : — One night, 
when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and 
after a day when I had felt more than usually ill and 
faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho 
Square: thither we went; and we sate down on the 5 
steps of a house, which, to this hour, I never pass 
without a pang of grief, and an inner act of homage 
to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the 
noble action which she there performed. Suddenly, 
as we sate, I grew much worse : I had been leaning 10 
my head against her bosom ; and all at once I sank 
from her arms and fell backwards on the steps. From 
the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction 
of the liveliest kind that without some powerful and 
reviving stimulus, I should either have died on the 15 
spot — or should at least have sunk to a point of 
exhaustion from which all reascent under my friend- 
less circumstances would soon have become hopeless. 
Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor 
orphan companion — who had herself met with little 20 
but injuries in this world — stretched out a saving 
hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but without a 
moment's delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in 
less time than could be imagined, returned to me with 
a glass of port wine and spices, that acted upon my 25 



42 CONFESSIOiYS OF AN 

empty stomach (which at that time woiikl have 
rejected all solid food) with an instantaneous power 
of restoration : and for this glass the generous girl 
without a murmur paid out of her humble purse at 
a time — be it remembered ! — when she had scarcely 
wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, 
and when she could have no reason to expect that I 
should ever be able to reimburse her. — Oh ! youthful 
benefactress ! how often in succeeding years, standing 
in solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of 
heart and perfect love, how often have I wished that, 
as in ancient times the curse of a father was believed 
to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its object 
w^ith a fatal necessity of self-fulhlment, — even so the 
benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might 
have a like prerogative; might have power given to 
it from above to °chace — to haunt — to way -lay — to 
overtake — to pursue thee into the central darkness 
of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the 
darkness of the grave — there to awaken thee with an 
authentic message of peace, and forgiveness, and of 
final reconciliation ! 

I do not often weep : for not only do my thoughts 
on subjects connected with the chief interests of man 
daily, nay hourly, descend a thousand fathoms °"too 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 43 

deep for tears ; " not only does the sternness of my 
habits of thought present an antagonism to the feel- 
ings which prompt tears — wanting of necessity to 
those who, being protected usually by their levity 
from any tendency to meditative sorrow, would by that 5 
same levity be made incapable of resisting it on any 
casual access of such feelings : — but also, I believe 
that all minds which have contemplated such objects 
as deeply as I have done, must, for their own protec- 
tion from utter despondency, have early encouraged 10 
and cherished some tranquilizing belief as to the fu- 
ture balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human 
sufferings. On these accounts, I am cheerful to this 
hour : and, as I have said, I do not often weep. °Yet 
some feelings, though not deeper or more passionate, 15 
are more tender than others : and often, when I walk 
at this time in Oxford Street by dreamy lamplight, 
and hear those airs played on a barrel-organ which 
years ago solaced me and my dear companion (as I 
must always call her) I shed tears, and muse with 20 
myself at the mysterious dispensation which so sud- 
denly and so critically separated us for ever. How 
it happened, the reader will understand from what 
remains of this introductory narration. 

Soon after the period of the last incident I have 25 



44 COJ^FESSIOXS OF AN 

recorded, I met, in Albemarle Street, a gentleman of 
his °late Majesty's liousehold. This gentleman had 
received hospitalities, on different occasions, from my 
family : and he challenged me upon the strength of 
5 my family likeness. I did not attempt any disguise : 
I answered his questions ingenuously, — and, on his 
pledging his word of honour that he would not betray 
me to my guardians, I gave him an address to my 
friend the Attorney's. The next day I received from 

10 him a 101. Bank-note. The letter inclosing it was 
delivered with other letters of business to the attor- 
ney : but, though his look and manner informed me 
that he suspected its contents, he gave it up to me 
honourably and without demur. 

15 This present, from the particular service to which 
it was applied, leads me naturally to speak of the pur- 
pose which had allured me up to London, and which 
I had been (to use a forensic word) °soUdtwg from the 
first day of my arrival in London, to that of my final 

20 departure. 

In so mighty a world as London, it will surprise my 
readers that I should not have found some means of 
staving off the last extremities of penury : and it will 
strike them that two resources at least must have been 

25 open to me, — viz. eii:her to seek assistance from the 



EKGLISH OPIUM-EATER 45 

friends of my family, or to turn my youthful talents 
and attainments into some channel of pecuniary emolu- 
ment. As to the first course, I may observe, generally, 
that what I dreaded beyond all other evils was the 
chance of being reclaimed by my guardians ; not doubt- 5 
ing that whatever power the law gave them would have 
been enforced against me to the utmost ; that is, to 
the extremity of forcibly restoring me to the school 
which I had quitted : a restoration which as it would 
in my eyes have been a dishonour, even if submitted 10 
to voluntarily, could not fail, when extorted from me 
in contempt and defiance of my known wishes and 
efforts, to have been a humiliation worse to me than 
death, and which would indeed have terminated in 
death. I was, therefore, shy enough of applying for 15 
assistance even in those quarters where I was sure of 
receiving it — at the risk of furnishing my guardians 
with any clue for recovering me. But, as to London 
in particular, though, doubtless, my father had in his 
life-time had many friends there, yet (as ten years had 20 
passed since his death) I remembered few of them 
even by name : and never having seen London before, 
except once for a few hours, I knew not the address 
of even those few. To this mode of gaining help, 
therefore, in part the difficulty, but much more the 25 



46 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

paramount fear which I have mentioned, habitually 
indisposed me. In regard to the other mode, I now 
feel half inclined to join my reader in wondering that 
I should have overlooked it. As a corrector of Greek 
5 proofs (if in no other way), I might doubtless have 
gained enough for my slender wants. Such an office 
as this I could have discharged with an exemplary and 
punctual accuracy that would soon have gained me 
the confidence of my employers. But it must not be 

10 forgotten that, even for such an office as this, it was 
necessary that I should first of all have an introduction 
to some respectable publisher: and this I had no means 
of obtaining. To say the truth, however, it had never 
once occurred to me to think of literary labours as 

15 a source of profit. No mode sufficiently speedy of 
obtaining money had ever occurred to me, but that 
of borrowing it on the strength of my future claims 
and expectations. This mode I sought by every ave- 
nue to compass: and amongst other persons I applied 

20 to a Jew named D[ell]. 

To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders 
(some of whom were, I believe, also Jews), I had 
introduced myself with an account of my expecta- 
tions ; which account, on examining my father's will 

25 at "Doctor's Commons, they had ascertained to be cor- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER ' 47 

rect. The person there mentioned as the second son 
of [°Thonias Quincey], was found to have all the claims 
(or more than all) that I had stated : but one question 
still remained, which the faces of the Jews pretty 
significantly suggested, — was / that person ? This 
doubt had never occurred to me as a possible one : I 
had rather feared, whenever my Jewish friends scruti- 
nised me keenly, that I might be too well known to 
be that person — and that some scheme might be pass- 
ing in their minds for entrapping me and selling me 
to my guardians. It was strange to me to find my 
own self, °materiaUter considered (so I expressed it, for 
I doated on logical accuracy of distinctions), accused, 
or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my own self, 
°formaliter considered. However, to satisfy their 
scruples, I took the only course in my power. Whilst 
I was in Wales, I had received various letters from 
young friends : these I produced : for I carried them 
constantly in my pocket — being, indeed, by this time, 
almost the only relics of my personal encumbrances 
(excepting the clothes I wore) which I had not in one 
way or other disposed of. Most of these letters were 
from the Earl of [Altanu)nt], who was at that time 
my chief (or rather only) confidential friend. These 
letters were dated from Eton. I had also some from 



48 C0NFI:SSI0KS OF AN' 

the Marquis of [Sligo], his father, who, though absorbed 
in > agricultural pursuits, yet having been an Etonian 
himself, and as good a scholar as a nobleman needs to 
be — still retained an affection for classical studies, 

5 and for youthful scholars. He had, accordingly, from 
the time that I was fifteen, corresponded with me; 
sometimes upon the great improvements which he had 
made, or was meditating, in the counties of M[ayo] 
and Sl[igo] since I had been there; sometimes upon 

10 the merits ot" a Latin poet ; and at other times, sug- 
gesting subjects to me on which he wished me to 
write verses. 

On reading the letters, one of my Jewish friends 
agreed to furnish two or three hundred pounds on 

15 my personal security — provided I could persuade the 
young Earl, who was, by the way, not older than 
myself, to guarantee the payment on our coming of 
age : the Jew's final object being, as I now suppose, not 
the trifling profit he could expect to make by me, but 

20 the prospect of establishing a connection with my noble 
friend, whose immense expeptations were well known 
to him. In pursuance of this prof)osal on the part of 
the Jew, about eight or nine days after I had received 
the 101. , I prepared to go down to Eton. Nearly 3^. 

25 of the money I had given to my money-lending friend, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 49 

on his alleging that the stamps must be bought, in 
order that the writings might be preparing whilst I 
was away from London. I thought in my heart that 
he was lying; but I did not wish to give him any 
excuse for charging his own delays upon me. A 5 
smaller sum I had given to my friend the attorney 
(who was connected with the money-lenders as their 
lawyer), to which, indeed, he was entitled for his 
unfurnished lodgings. About fifteen shillings I had 
employed in re-establishing (though in a very humble 10 
way) my dress. Of the remainder 1 gave one quarter 
to Ann, meaning on my return to have divided with 
her whatever might remain. These arrangements 
made, — soon after six o'clock, on a dark winter even- 
ing, I set off, accompanied by Ann, towards Picca- 15 
dilly ; for it was my intention to go down as far as 
Salt-hill on the Bath or Bristol Mail. Our course lay 
through a part of the town which has now all dis- 
appeared, so that I can no longer retrace its ancient 
boundaries : Swallow-street, I think it was called. 20 
Having time enough before us, however, we bore 
away to the left until we came into Golden-square : 
there, near the corner of Sherrard-street, we sat down ; 
not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Picca- 
dilly. I had told her of my plans some time before : 25 



50 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

and I now assured her again that she should share in 
my good fortune, if I met with any ; and that I would 
never forsake her, as soon as I had power to protect 
her. This I fully intended, as much from inclination 
5 as from a sense of duty : for, setting aside gratitude, 
which in any case must have made me her debtor for 
life, I loved her as affectionately as if she had been 
my sister : and at this moment, with seven-fold ten- 
derness, from pity at witnessing her extreme dejection. 

10 I had, apparently, most reason for dejection, because 
I was leaving the saviour of my life : yet I, consider- 
ing the shock my health had received, was cheerful 
and full of hope. She, on the contrary, who was 
parting with one who had had little means of serving 

15 her, except by kindness and brotherly treatment, was 
overcome by sorrow ; so that, when I kissed her at 
our final farewell, she put her arms about my neck, 
and wept without speaking a word. I hoped to return 
in a week at farthest, and I agreed with her that on 

20 the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards, 
she should wait for me at six' o'clock, near the bottom 
of Great Titchfield-street, which had been our cus- 
tomary haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent 
our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of 

25 Oxford-street. This, and other measures of precaution. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 51 

I took : one only I forgot. She had either never told 
me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had for- 
gotten, her surname. It is a general practice, indeed, 
with girls of humble rank in her unhappy condition, 
not (as novel-reading women of higher pretensions) to 5 
style themselves — Miss Douglas, Miss Montague, &g. 
but simply by their Christian names, Mary, Jane, 
Frances, &c. Her surname, as the surest means of 
tracing her hereafter, I ought now to have inquired : 
but the truth is, having no reason to think that our 10 
meeting could, in consequence of a short interruption, 
be more difficult or uncertain than it had been for so 
many weeks, I had scarcely for a moment adverted to 
it as necessary, or placed it amongst my memoranda 
against this parting interview: and, my final anxieties 15 
being spent in comforting her with hopes, and in 
pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medi- 
cines for a violent cough and hoarseness with which 
she was troubled, I wholly forgot it until it was too 
late to recal her. 20 

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Glou- 
cester Coffee-house : and, the Bristol Mail being on 
the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The 
°fine fluent motion of this Mail soon laid me asleep : 
it is somewhat remarkable, that the first easy or 25 



52 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some 
months, was on the outside of a Mail-coach — a bed 
which, at this day, I find rather an uneasy one. Con- 
nected with this sleep was a little incident, which 
5 served, as hundreds of others did at that time, to con- 
vince me how easily a man who has never been in any 
great distress, may pass through life without knowing, 
in his own person at least, anything of the possible 
goodness of the human heart — or, as I must add with 

10 a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of 
manners is drawn over the features and expression of 
men's natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two 
extremities, and the "infinite field of varieties which 
lie between them, are all confounded — the vast and 

15 multitudinous compass of their several harmonies 
reduced to the meagre outline of differences expressed 
in the gamut or ali)habet of elementary sounds. .The 
case was this : for the first four or five miles from 
London, I annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof 

20 by occasionally falling against him when the coach 
gave a lurch to his side ; and indeed, if the road had 
been less smooth and level than it is, I should have 
fallen off from Aveakness. Of this annoyance he com- 
plained heavily, as perhaps, in the same circumstances 

25 'most people would; he expressed his complaint, how- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 53 

ever, more morosely than the occasion seemed to war- 
rant ; and, if I had parted with him at that moment, 
I should have thought of him (if I had considered it 
worth while to think of him at all) as a surly and 
almost brutal fellow. However, I was conscious that 5 
I had given him some cause for complaint : and, there- 
fore, I apologized to him, and assured him I would do 
what I could to avoid falling asleep for the future ; 
and, at the same time, in as few words as possible, I 
explained to him that I was ill and in a weak state 10 
from long suffering; and that I could not afford at 
that time to take an inside place. This man's manner 
changed, upon hearing this explanation, in an instant : 
and when I next woke for a minute from the noise 
and lights of Hounslow (for in spite of my wishes and 15 
efforts I had fallen asleep again within two minutes 
from the time I had sfjoken to him) I found that he 
had put his arm round me to protect me from falling 
off: and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me 
with the gentleness of a woman, so that, at length, I 20 
almost lay in his arms : and this was the more kind, 
as he could not have known that I was not going the 
whole way to Bath or Bristol. Unfortunately, indeed, 
I did go rather farther than I intended : for so genial 
and refreshing was my sleep, that the next time, after 25 



54 . CONFESSIONS OF AN 

leaving Hounslow that I fully awoke, was upon the 
sudden pulling up of the Mail (possibly at a Post- 
office) ; and, on inquiry, I found that we had reached 
Maidenhead — six or seven miles, I think, a-head of 

5 Salt-hill. Here I alighted: and for the half minute 
that the Mail stopped, I was entreated by my friendly 
companion (who, from the transient glimpse I had had 
of him in Piccadilly, seemed to me to be a gentleman's 
butler — or person of that rank) to go to bed without 

10 delay. This I promised, though with no intention of 
doing so : and in fact, I immediately set forward, or 
rather backward, on foot. It must then have been 
nearly midnight : but so slowly did I creep along, that 
I heard a clock in a cottage strike four before I turned 

15 down the lane from Slough to Eton. The air and the 
sleep had both refreshed me ; but I was weary never- 
theless. I remember a thought (obvious enough, and 
which has been °prettily expressed by a Koman poet) 
which gave me some consolation at that moment under 

20 my poverty. There had been some time before a mur- 
der committed on or near Hounslow-heath. I think 
I cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of the 
murdered person was Steele, and that he was the owner 
of a lavender plantation in that neighbourhood. Every 

25 step of my progress was bringing me nearer to the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 55 

Heath : and it naturally occurred to me that I and the 
accused murderer, if he were that night abroad, might 
at every instant be unconsciously approaching each 
other through the darkness : in which case, said I, — 
supposing I, instead of being (as indeed I am) little 
better than an outcast, — 

°Lord of my learning and no land beside, 

were, like my friend. Lord [Altamont], heir by gen- 
eral repute to 70,000?. per ann., what a panic should 
I be under at this moment about my throat ! — indeed, 
it was not likely that Lord [Altamont] should ever be 
in my situation. But nevertheless, the spirit of the 
remark remains true — that vast power and posses- 
sions make a man shamefully afraid of dying : and I 
am convinced that many of the most intrepid adven- 
turers, who, by fortunately being poor, enjoy the full 
use of their natural courage, would, if at the very 
instant of going into action news were brought to 
them that they had unexpectedly succeeded to an 
estate in England of 50,000/. a-year, feel their dislike 
to bullets considerably sharpened — and their efforts 
at perfect equanimity and self-possession proportion- 
ably difficult. So true it is, in the language of a 
wise man whose own experience had made him 



5G CONFESSIOyS OF AN 

acquainted with both fortunes, that riches are better 

fitted — 

°To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 
Than tempt her to do ought may merit praise. 

Farad. Begained. 

5 I dally with niy subject because, to myself, the re- 
membrance of these times is profoundly interesting. 
But my reader shall not have any further cause to 
complain : for I now hasten to its close. — In the 
road between Slough and Eton, I fell asleep : and, 

o just as the morning began to dawn, I was awakened 
by the voice of a man standing over me and surveying 
me. I know not what he was : he was an ill-looking 
fellow — but not therefore of necessity an ill-meaning 
fellow : or, if he were, I suppose he thought that no 

5 person sleeping out-of-doors in winter could be worth 
robbing. In which conclusion, however, as it re- 
garded myself, I beg to assure him, if he should be 
among my readers, that he was mistaken. After a 
slight remark he passed on : and I was not sorry at 

o his disturbance, as it enabled me to pass through 
Eton before people were generally up. The night 
had been heavy and lowering : but towards the morn- 
ing it had changed to a slight frost : and the ground 
and the trees were now covered with rime. I slipped 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 57 

through Eton unobserved ; washed myself, and, as far 
as possible, adjusted my dress at a little public-house 
in Windsor ; and about °eight o'clock went down 
towards °Pote's. On my road I met some junior boys, 
of whom I made inquiries : an Etonian is always a 5 
gentleman; and, in spite of my shabby habiliments, 
they answered me civilly. My friend. Lord [Alta- 
mont], was gone to the University of [Cambridge]. 
°' Ibi omnis effusus labor ! ' I had, however, other 
friends at Eton : but it is not to all who wear that 10 
name in prosperity that a man is willing to present 
himself in distress. On recollecting myself, however, 
I asked for the Earl of D[esart], to whom, (though my 
acquaintance with him was not so intimate as with 
some others) I should not have shrunk from pre- 15 
senting myself under any circumstances. He was 
still at Eton, though I believe on the wing for Cam- 
bridge. I called, was received kindly, and asked to 
breakfast. 

Here let me stop for a moment to check my reader 20 
from any erroneous conclusions : because I have had 
occasion incidentally to speak of various patrician 
friends, it must not be supposed that I have myself 
any pretention to rank or high blood. I thank God 
that I have not : — I am the son of a plain English 25 



58 CONFJESSIONS OF AN 

merchant, esteemed during his life for his great in 
tegrity, and strongly attached to literary pursuits 
(indeed, he was °himself, anonymously, an author): 
if he had lived, it was expected that he would have 
been very rich; but, dying prematurely, he left no 
more than about 30,000Z. amongst seven different 
claimants. My mother I may mention with honour, as 
still more highly gifted. For, though unpretending 
to the name and honours of a literary woman, I shall 
presume to call her (what many literary women are 
not) an inteUectual woman : and I believe that if ever 
°her letters should be collected and published, they 
would be thought generally to exhibit as much strong 
and masculine sense, delivered in as pure ^mother 
English,' racy and fresh with idiomatic graces, as any 
in our language — hardly excepting those of °Lady M. 
W. Montague. — These are my honours of descent: 
I have no other : and I have thanked God sincerely 
that I have not, because, in my judgment, a station 
which raises a man too eminently above the level of 
his fellow-creatures is not the most favourable to 
moral, or to intellectual qualities. 

Lord D[esart] placed before me a most magnificent 
breakfast. It was really so ; but in my eyes it seemed 
trebly magnificent — from being the first regular meal, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 59 

the first °" good man's table, '^ that I had sate down to 
for months. Strange to say, however, I could scarce 
eat anything. On the day when I first received my 
10/. Bank-note, I had gone to a baker's shop and 
bought a couple of rolls : this very shop I had two 5 
months or six weeks before surveyed with an eager- 
ness of desire which it was almost humiliating to me 
to recollect. I remembered °the story about Otway ; 
and feared that there might be danger in eating too 
rapidly. But I had no need for alarm, my appetite 10 
was quite sunk, and I became sick before I had eaten 
half of what I had bought. This effect from eating 
what approached to a meal, I continued to feel for 
weeks: or, when I did not experience any nausea, 
part of what I ate was rejected, sometimes with 15 
acidity, sometimes immediately, and without any 
acidity. On the present occasion, at Lord D[esart]'s 
table I found myself not at all better than usual : 
and, in the midst of luxuries, I had no appetite. I 
had, however, unfortunately at all times a craving for 20 
wine: I explained my situation, therefore, to Lord 
D[esart], and gave him a short account of my late 
sufferings, at which he expressed great compassion, 
and called for Avine. This gave me a momentary 
relief and pleasure ; and on all occasions when I had 25 



60 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

an opportunity, I never failed to drink wine — which 
I worshipped then as I have since worshipped opium. 
I am convinced, however, that this indulgence in 
wine contributed to strengthen my malady; for the 
5 tone of my stomach was apparently quite sunk ; and 
by a better regimen it might sooner, and perhaps ef- 
fectually, have been revived. I hope that it was not 
from this love of wine that I lingered in the neighbour- 
hood of my Eton friends : I persuaded myself tJien 

lo that it was from reluctance to ask of Lord D[esart], 
on whom I was conscious I had not sufficient claims, 
the particular service in quest of which I had come 
down to Eton. I was, however, unwilling to lose my 
journey, and — I asked it. Lord D[esart], whose good 

15 nature was unbounded, and which, in regard to myself, 
had been measured rather by his compassion perhaps 
for my condition, and his knowledge of my intimacy 
with some of his relatives, than by an over-rigorous 
inquiry into the extent of my own direct claims, 

20 faultered, nevertheless, at this request. He acknow- 
ledged that he did not like to have any dealings with 
money-lenders, and feared lest such a transaction 
might come to the ears of his connexions. Moreover, 
he doubted whether his signature, whose expectations 

25 were so much more bounded than those of [his cou- 



E^^GLISH OPIUM-EATER 61 

sin], would avail with my unchristian friends. How- 
ever, he did not wish, as it seemed, to mortify me by 
an absolute refusal : for after a little consideration, 
he promised, under certain conditions which he 
pointed out, to give his security. Lord D[esart] was 
at this time not eighteen years of age: but I have 
often doubted, on recollecting since the good sense 
and prudence which on this occasion he mingled with 
so much urbanity of manner (an urbanity which in 
him wore the grace of youthful sincerity), whether 
any statesman — the oldest and the most accomplished 
in diplomacy — could have acquitted himself better 
under the same circumstances. Most people, indeed, 
cannot be addressed on such a business, without sur- 
veying you with looks as austere and unpropitious as 
those of a °Saracen's head. 

Kecomforted by this promise, which was not quite 
equal to the best, but far above the worst that I had 
pictured to myself as possible, I returned in a Wind- 
sor coach to London three days after I had quitted it. 
And now I come to the end of my story : — The Jews 
did not approve of Lord D[esart]'s terms ; whether they 
would in the end have acceded to them, and were only 
seeking time for making due inquiries, I know not; 
but many delays were made — time passed on — the 



62 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

small fragment of my bank note had just melted away; 
and before any conclusion could have been put to the 
business, I must have relapsed into my former state of 
wretchedness. Suddenly, however, at this crisis, an 
5 opening was made, almost by accident, for reconcili- 
ation with my friends. I quitted London, in haste, 
for a remote part of England: after some time, I pro- 
ceeded to the university ; and it was not until many 
months had passed away, that I had it in my power 

10 again to re-visit the ground which had become so inter- 
esting to me, and to this day remains so, as the chief 
scene of my youthful sufferings. 

Meantime, what had become of poor Anne? For 
her I have reserved my concluding words : according 

15 to our agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for 
her every night, so long as I staid in London, at 
the corner of Titchfield-Street. I inquired for her of 
every one who was likely to know her ; and, during 
the last hours of my stay in London, I put into activ- 

20 ity every means of tracing her that my knowledge of 
London suggested, and the limited extent of my power 
made possible. The street where she had lodged I 
knew, but not the house; and I remembered at last 
some account which she had given me of ill treatment 

25 from her landlord, which made it probable that she 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 63 

had quitted those lodgings before we parted. She 
had few acquaintance ; most people, besides, thought 
that the earnestness of my inquiries arose from mo- 
tives which moved their laughter, or their slight re- 
gard; and others, thinking I was in chase of a girl 5 
who had robbed me of some trifles, were naturally 
and excusably indisposed to give me any clue to her, 
if, indeed they had any to give. Finally, as my des- 
pairing resource, on the day I left London I put into 
the hands of the only person who (I was sure) must ic 
know Anne by sight, from having, been in company 
with us once or twice, an address to [the Priory] in 
[Chester]shire, at that time the residence of my family. 
But, to this hour, I have never heard a syllable about 
her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet i- 
with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. — If 
she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in 
search of each other, at the very same moment, through 
the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps, even 
within a few feet of each other — a barrier no wider 2c 
in a London street, often amounting in the end to a 
separation for eternity ! During some years, I hoped 
that she did live ; and I suppose that, in the literal and 
unrhetorical use of the word myriad, I may say that on 
my different visits to London, I have looked into many, 2= 



64 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

many myriads of female faces, in the liope of meeting 
her. I should know her again amongst a thousand, if 
I saw her for a moment ; for, though not handsome, 
she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a 
peculiar and graceful carriage of the head. — I sought 
her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years ; but 
now I should fear to see her; and her cough, which 
grieved me when I parted with her, is now my conso- 
lation. I now wish to see her no longer ; but think of 
her more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave ; 
in the grave, I would hope, of a °Magdalen; taken 
away, before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and 
transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities 
of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun.° 



KNGLtsn OPtUM-EATER 65 



PART II 

So then, Oxford-street, stony-hearted step-mother ! 
thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drink- 
est the tears of children, at length I was dismissed 
from thee : the time was come at last that I no more 
should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces; 5 
no more should dream, and wake in captivity to the 
pangs of hunger. Successors, too many, to myself and 
Ann, have, doubtless, since then trodden in our foot- 
steps — inheritors of our calamities : other orphans 
than Ann have sighed : tears have been shed by other 10 
children : and thou, Oxford-street, hast since, doubt- 
less, echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts. 
For myself, however, the storm which I had outlived 
seemed to have been the pledge of a long fair-weather ; 
the premature sufferings which I had paid down, to 15 
have been accepted as a ransom for many years to 
come, as a price of long immunity from sorrow : and 
if again I walked in London, a solitary and contem- 
plative man (as oftentimes I did), I walked for the 
most part in serenity and peace of mind. And, 20 



66 CON-FESSIONS OF AN 

although it is true that the calamities of my novici- 
ate in London had struck root so deeply in my bodily 
constitution that afterwards they shot up and flour- 
ished afresh, and grew into a noxious umbrage that 
5 has overshadowed and darkened my latter years, yet 
these second assaults of suffering were met with a 
fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of a 
maturer intellect, and with alleviations from sympa- 
thising affection — how deep and tender ! 

lo Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years 
that were far asunder were bound together by subtle 
links of suffering derived from a common root. And 
herein I notice an instance of the short-sightedness of 
human desires, that oftentimes on moonlight nights, 

15 during my first mournful abode in London, my conso- 
lation was (if such it could be thought) to gaze from 
Oxford-street up every avenue in succession which 
pierces through the heart of Marylebone to the fields 
and the woods ; for that, said I, travelling with my 

20 eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and 
part in shade, " that is °the road to the North, and 
therefore to [Grasmere], and if I had °the wings of a 
dove, that way I would fly for comfort."- Thus I said, 
and thus I wished, in my blindness ; yet, even in that 

25 very northern region it was, even in that very valley. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 67 

nay, in °that very house to which my erroneous wishes 
pointed, that this second birth of my sufferings began ; 
and that they again threatened to besiege the citadel 
of life and hope. There it was^ that for years I was 
persecuted by visions as ugly, and as ghastly phantoms 5 
as ever haunted the couch of an Orestes : and in this 
unhappier than he, that sleep, which comes to all as 
a respite and a restoration, and to him especially, as 
a °blessed balm for his wounded heart and his haunted 
brain, visited me as my bitterest scourge. Thus blind 10 
was I in my desires ; yet, if a veil interposes between 
the dim-sightedness of man and his future calamities, 
the same veil hides from him their alleviations ; and 
a grief which had not been feared is met by consola- 
tions which had not been hoped. I, therefore, who 15 
participated, as it were, in the troubles of Orestes 
(excepting only in his agitated conscience), partici- 
pated no less in all his supports : my °Eumenides, like 
his, were at my bed-feet, and stared in upon me through 
the curtains: but, watching by my pillow, or defraud- 20 
ing herself of sleep to bear me company through the 
heavy watches of the night, sate my Electra : for 
thou, beloved °M[argaret], dear companion of my later 
years, thou wast my Electra! and neither in nobility 
of mind nor in long-suffering affection, wouldst per- 25 



68 CONFESSION'S OF AN 

mit that a Grecian sister should excel an English 
wife. For thou thoughtst not much to stoop to 
humble offices of kindness, and to °servile ministrations 
of tenderest affection; — to wipe away for years the 

5 unwholesome dews upon the forehead, or to refresh 
the lips when parched and baked with fever; nor, 
even when thy own peaceful slumbers had by long 
sympathy become infected with the spectacle of my 
dread contest with phantoms and shadowy enemies 

10 that oftentimes bade me °" sleep no more ! " — not 
even then, didst thou utter a complaint or any mur- 
mur, nor withdraw thy angelic smiles, nor shrink 
from thy service of love more than Electra did of old. 
For she too, though she was a Grecian woman, and 

15 the daughter of the °king of men, yet wept sometimes, 
and °hid her face in her robe. 

But these troubles are past: and thou wilt read 
these records of a period so dolorous to us both as 
the legend of some hideous dream that can return no 

20 more. Meantime, I am again in London: and again 
I pace the terraces of Oxford-street by night: and 
oftentimes, when I am oppressed by anxieties that 
demand all my philosophy and the comfort of thy 
presence to support, and yet remember that I am 

25 separated from thee by three hundred miles, and the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 69 

length of three dreary months, — I look up the streets 
that run northwards from Oxford-street, upon moon- 
light nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation 
of anguish ; — and remembering that thou art sitting 
alone in that same valley, and mistress of that very 5 
house to which my heart turned in its blindness nine- 
teen years ago, I think that, though blind indeed, and 
scattered to the winds of late, the promptings of my 
heart may yet have had reference to a remoter time, 
and may be justified if read in another meaning : — 10 
and, if I could allow myself to descend again to the 
impotent wishes of childhood, I should again say to 
myself, as I look to the north, " Oh, that I had the 

wings of a dove " and with how just a confidence 

in thy good and gracious nature might I add the other 15 
half of my early ejaculation — "And that way I would 
fly for comfort.'' 

THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 

It is so long since I first took opium, that if it had 
been a trifling incident in my life, I might have for- 
gotten its date : but cardinal events are not to be 20 
forgotten ; and from circumstances connected with it, 
I remember that it must be referred to the autumn 



70 CONFJ^SSIONS OF AN 

of 1804. During that season I was in London, having 
come thither for the first time since my entrance at 
college. And my introduction to opium arose in the 
following way, From an early age I had been accus- 
tomed to wash my head in cold water at least once a 
day : being suddenly seized with tooth-ache I attrib- 
uted it to some relaxation caused by an accidental 
intermission of that practice; jumped put of bed; 
plunged my head into a bason of cold water ; and with 
hair thus wetted went to sleep. The next morning, 
as I need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheu- 
matic pains of the head and face, from which I had 
hardly any respite for about twenty days. On the 
twenty -first day, I think it was, and on a Sunday, 
that I went out into the streets ; rather to run away, 
if possible, from my torments, than with any distinct 
purpose. By accident I met a college acquaintance 
who recommended opium. Opium ! dread agent of 
unimaginable pleasure and pain ! I had heard of it 
as I had of manna or of Ambrosia, but no further: 
how unmeaning a sound was it at that time! what 
solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart ! what 
heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remem- 
brances ! Reverting for a moment to these, I feel a 
mystic importance attached to the minutest circum- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 71 

stances connected with the place and the time, and 
the man (if man he was) that first laid open to me 
the Paradise of Opium-eaters. It was a Sunday after- 
noon, wet and cheerless : and a duller spectacle this 
earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in 
London. My road homewards lay through Oxford- 
street ; and near °" the stately Pantheon," (as Mr. 
Wordsworth has obligingly called it) I saw a drug- 
gist's shop. The druggist — unconscious minister of 
celestial pleasures! — as if in sympathy with the rainy 
Sunday, looked dull and stupid, just as any mortal 
druggist might be expected to look on a Sunday : and 
when I asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to 
me as any other man might do : and furthermore, out 
of my shilling, returned me what seemed to be real 
copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. 
Nevertheless, in spite of such indications of humanity, 
he has ever since existed in my mind as the beatific 
vision of an immortal druggist, sent down to earth on 
a special mission to myself. And it confirms me in 
this way of considering him, that, when I next came 
up to London, I sought him near the stately Pan- 
theon, and found him not : and thus to me, who knew 
not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather 
to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have re- 



72 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

moved in any bodily fashion. The reader may choose 
to think of him as, possibly, no more than a sublunary 
druggist : it may be so : but my faith is better : I 
believe him to have °evanesced, or evaporated. So 
unwillingly would I connect any mortal remembrances 
with that hour, and place, and creature, that first 
brought me acquainted with the celestial drug. 

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I 
lost not a* moment in taking the quantity prescribed. 
I was necessarily ignorant -of the whole art and mys- 
tery of opium-taking : and, what I took, I took under 
every disadvantage. But I took it : — and in an hour, 
oh ! Heavens ! what a revulsion ! what an upheaving, 
from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an 
apocalypse of the world within me ! That my pains 
had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes : — this neg- 
ative effect was s\Vallowed up in the immensity of those 
positive effects which had opened before me — in the 
abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. 
Here was a panacea — a ^cfyapfxaKov vrj-n-evOc^i for all hu- 
man woes: here was the secret of happiness, about 
which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, 
at once discovered : happiness might now be bought 
for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: 
portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 73 

bottle : and peace of mind could be sent down in gal- 
lons by the mail coach. But, if I talk in this way, 
the reader will think I am laughing : and I can assure 
him, that nobody will laugh long who deals much with 
opium : its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn 5 
complexion ; and in his happiest state, the opium-eater 
cannot present himself in the character of °V Allegro : 
even then, he speaks and thinks as becomes °Il Pense- 
roso. Nevertheless, I have a very reprehensible way 
of jesting at times in the midst of my own misery : 10 
and, unless when I am checked by some more power- 
ful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty of this in- 
decent practice even in these annals of suffering or 
enjoyment. The reader must allow a little to my 
infirm nature in this respect: and with a few indul- 15 
gences of that sort, I shall endeavour to be as grave, 
if not drowsy, as fits a theme like opium, so anti-mer- 
curial as it really is, and so drowsy as it is falsely 
reputed. 

And, first, one word with respect to its bodily effects : 20 
for upon all that has been hitherto written on the sub- 
ject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey (who 
may plead their privilege of lying as an old imme- 
morial right), or by professors of medicine, writing 
°ex cathedra, — I have but one emphatic criticism to 25 



74 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

pronounce — Lies ! lies ! lies ! I remember once, in 
passing a book-stall, to have caught these words from 
a page of some satiric author : — "By this time I be- 
came convinced that the London newspapers spoke 
5 truth at least twice a week, viz. on Tuesday and Sat- 
urday, and might safely be depended upon for — the 
list of bankrupts." In like manner, I do by no means 
deny that some truths have been delivered to the world 
in regard to opium : thus it has been repeatedly af- 

10 firmed by the learned, that opium is a dusky brown 
in colour; and this, take notice, 1 grant: secondly, that 
it is rather dear, which also I grant : for in my time 
East-India opium has been three guineas a pound, and 
Turkey eight : and, thirdly, that if you eat a good deal 

15 of it, most probably you must — do what is particu- 
larly disagreeable to any man of regular habits, viz. 
°die. These weighty propositions are, all and singular, 
true : I cannot gainsay them : and truth ever was, and 
will be, commendable. But in these three theorems, 

20 I believe we have exhausted the stock of knowledge 
as yet accumulated by men on the subject of opium. 
And therefore, worthy doctors, as there seems to be 
room for further discoveries, stand aside, and allow 
me to come forward and lecture on this matter. 

25 First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 75 

granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or 
incidentally, that it does, or can, produce intoxication. 
Now, reader, assure yourself, °meo periculo, that no 
quantity of opium ever did, or could intoxicate. As 
to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum) 
that might certainly intoxicate if a man could bear to 
take enough of it ; but why ? because it contains so 
much proof spirit, and not because it contains so much 
opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is 
incapable of producing any state of body at all resem- 
bling that which is produced by alcohol ; and not in 
degree only incapable, but even in kind: it is not in 
the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, 
that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by wine 
is always mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which 
it declines : that from opium, when once generated, is 
stationary for eight or ten hours : the first, to borrow 
a technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute 
— the second, of chronic pleasure : the one is a flame, 
the other a steady and equable glow. But the main 
distinction lies in this, that whereas wine disorders the 
mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a 
proper manner), introduces amongst them the most 
exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs 
a man of his self-possession : opium greatly invigorates 



76 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

it. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and gives 
a preternatural brightness, and a vivid exaltation to 
the contempts and the admirations, the loves and the ha- 
treds, of the drinker : opium, on the contrary, commun- 
5 icates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active 
or passive : and with respect to the temper and moral 
feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital 
warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which 
would probably always accompany a bodily constitution 

lo of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, 
opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and 
the benevolent affections : but then, with this remark- 
able difference, that in the sudden development of kind- 
heartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is 

15 always more or less of a maudlin character, which ex- 
poses it to the contempt of the by-stander. Men shake 
hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears — no 
mortal knows why : and the sensual creature is clearly 
uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings, 

20 incident to opium, is no febrile access, but a healthy 
restoration to that state which, the mind would natu- 
rally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irri- 
tation of pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with 
the impulses of a heart originally just and good. True 

25 it is, that even wine, up to a certain point, and with 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 77 

certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the 
intellect : I myself, who have never been a great wine- 
drinker, used to find that half a dozen glasses of wine 
advantageously affected the faculties — brightened and 
intensified the consciousness — and gave to the mind 
a feeling of being "^^ ponderibus librata suis: " and cer- 
tainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of 
any man, that he is disguised in liquor : for, on the con- 
trary, most men are disguised by sobriety ; and it is 
when they are drinking (as some old gentleman says 
in °Athen8enus), that men eavTov<i e^^avt'^ovo-ti/ oiVti/e? daCv 
— display themselves in their true complexion of char- 
acter ; which surely is not disguising themselves. But 
still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurd- 
ity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it 
is sure to volatilize and to disperse the intellectual 
energies : whereas opium always seems to compose 
what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had 
been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, 
a man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, 
and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into 
supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal, 
part of his nature : but the opium-eater (I speak of 
him who is not suffering from any disease, or other 
remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner part of 



78 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

his nature is paramount ; that is, the moral affections 
are in a state of cloudless serenity ; and over all is the 
great light of the majestic intellect. 

This is the doctrine of the true church on the sub- 
5 ject of opium : of which church I acknowledge my- 
self to be the only member — the alpha and the omega : 
but then it is to be recollected, that I speak from the 
ground of a large and profound personal experience : 
Avhereas most of the ^unscientific authors who have 

10 at all treated of opium, and even of those who have 
written expressly on the materia medica, make it evi- 
dent, from the horror they express of it, that their 
experimental knowledge of its action is none at all. 
■ I will, however, candidly acknowledge that I have 

15 met with one person who bore evidence to its intoxi- 
cating power, such as staggered my own incredulity : 
for he was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium 
largely. I happened to say to him, that his enemies 
(as I had heard) charged him with talking nonsense 

20 on politics, and that his friends apologized for him, 
by suggesting that he was constantly in a state of 
intoxication from opium. Now the accusation, said 
I, is not °primd facie, and of necessity, an absurd one : 
but the defence is. To my surprise, however, he in- 

25 sisted that both his enemies and his friends were in 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 79 

the right: "I will maintain," said he, '-that I do talk 
nonsense ; and secondly, I will maintain that I do 
not talk nonsense upon principle, or with any view 
to profit, but solely and simply, said he, solely and 
simply, — solely and simply (repeating it three times 
over), because I am drunk Avith opium; and that 
daily." • I replied that, as to the allegation of his 
enemies, as it seemed to be established upon such 
respectable testimony, seeing that the three parties 
concerned all agree in it, it did not become ]ne to 
question it ; but the defence set up I must demur to. 
He proceeded to discuss the matter, and to lay down 
his reasons : but it seemed to me so impolite to pur- 
sue an argument which must have presumed a man 
mistaken in a point belonging to his own profession, 
that I did not press hiin even when his course of argu- 
ment seemed open to objection : not to mention that 
a man who talks nonsense, even though " with no 
view to profit," is' not altogether the most agreeable 
partner in a dispute, whether as opponent or respon- 
dent. I confess, however, that the authority of a 
surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one, may 
seem a weighty one to my prejudice : but still I must 
plead my experience, which was greater than his 
greatest by 7000 drops a day ; and, though it was not 



80 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

possible to suppose a medical man unacquainted with 
the characteristic symptoms of vinous intoxication, 
it yet struck me that he might proceed on a logical 
error of using the word intoxication with too great 
latitude, and extending it generically to all modes of 
nervous excitement, instead of restricting it as the 
expression for a specific sort of excitement, connected 
with certain diagnostics. Some people have main- 
tained in my hearing, that they had been drunk upon 
green tea : and a medical student in London, for whose 
knowledge in his profession I have reason to feel great 
respect, assured me, the other day, that a patient, in re- 
covering from an illness, had got drunk on a beef -steak. 
Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error, 
in respect to opium, I shall notice very briefly a second 
and a third; which are, that the elevation of spirits 
produced by opium is necessarily followed by a pro- 
portionate depression, and that the natural and even 
immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagna- 
tion, animal and mental. The first of these errors I 
shall content myself with simply denying; assuring 
my reader, that for ten years, during which I took 
opium at intervals, the day succeeding to that on which 
I allowed myself this luxury was always a day of 
unusually good spirits. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 81 

°Witli respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or 
rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures 
of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany the practice 
of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium 
is classed under the head of narcotics ; and some such 5 
effect it may produce in the end: but the primary 
effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, 
to excite and stimulate the system : this first stage of 
its action always lasted with me, during my noviciate, 
for upwards of eight hours ; so that it must be the 10 
fault of the opium-eater himself if he does not so time 
his "exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as that 
the whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend 
upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are 
absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, 15 
on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But that 
the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is 
likely to stupify the faculties of an Englishman, I 
shall (by way of treating the question illustratively, 
rather than argumentatively) describe the way in 20 
which I myself often passed an opium evening in 
London, during the period between 1804-1812. It 
will be seen, that at least opium did not move me 
to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or 
the torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the 25 



82 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Turks. I give this account at the risk of being pro- 
nounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary : but I regard 
that little : I must desire my reader to bear in mind, 
that I was a hard student, and at severe studies for 
all the rest of my time : and certainly I had a right 
occasionally to relaxations as well as other people: 
these, however, I allowed myself but seldom. 

The late Duke of [Norfolk] used to say, "Next 
Friday, by the blessing of Heaven, I purpose to be 
drunk : " and in like manner I used to fix beforehand 
how often, within a given time, and when, I would 
commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more 
than once in three weeks : for at that time I could not 
have ventured to call every day (as I did afterwards) 
for "a glass of laudanum negus, warm, and ivithout 
sugar.'' No: as I have said, I seldom drank lauda- 
num, at that time, more than once in three weeks : 
this was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday night ; 
my reason for which was this. In those days °Gras- 
sini sang at the Opera : and her voice was delightful 
to me beyond all that I had ever heard. I know not 
what may be the state of the Opera-house now, having 
never been within its walls for seven or eight years, 
but at that time it was by much the most pleasant 
place of public resort in London for passing an even- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 83 

ing. Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, 
which was subject to far less annoyance than the pit 
of the theatres : the orchestra was distinguished by 
its sweet and melodious grandeur from all English 
orchestras, the composition of which, I confess, is not 5 
acceptable to my ear, from the predominance of the 
clamorous instruments, and the absolute tyranny of 
the violin. The choruses were divine to hear: and 
when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often 
did, and poured forth her passionate soul as °Androm- 10 
ache, at the tomb of Hector, &c. I question whether 
any Turk, of all that ever entered the Paradise of 
opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. 
But, indeed, I honour the Barbarians too much by 
supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching 15 
to the intellectual ones of an Englishman. For music 
is an intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to 
the temperament of him who hears it. And, by the 
bye, with the exception of °the fine extravaganza on 
that subject in Twelfth Night, I do not recollect more 20 
than one thing said adequately on the subject of 
music in all literature : it is a ^passage in the Relkjio 
Medici of Sir T. Brown ; and, though chiefly remark- 
able for its sublimity, has also a philosophic value, 
inasmuch as it points to the true theory of musical 25 



84 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

effects. The mistake of most people is to suppose 
that it is by the ear they communicate with music, 
and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its 
effects. But this is not so : it is by the re-action of 
5 the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter com- 
ing by the senses, the fonn from the mind) that the 
pleasure is constructed : and therefore it is that peo- 
ple of equally good ear differ so much in this point 
from one another. Now opium, by greatly increasing 

10 the activity of the mind generally, increases, of neces- 
sity, that particular mode of its activity by which we 
are able to construct out of the raw material of organic 
sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. But, says a 
friend, a succession of musical sounds is to me like a 

15 collection of Arabic characters: I can attach no ideas 
to them. Ideas ! my good sir ? there is no occasion 
for them : all that class of ideas, which can be avail- 
able in such a case, has a language of representative 
feelings. °But this is a subject foreign to my present 

20 purposes : it is sufficient to say, that a chorus, &c. of 
elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a piece 
of arras work, the whole of my past life — not, as if 
recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and 
incarnated in the music : no longer painful to dwell 

25 upon : but the detail of its incidents removed, or 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 85 

blended in some hazy abstraction ; and its passions 
exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to 
be had for five shillings. And over and above the 
music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around 
me, in the intervals of the performance, the music of 5 
the Italian language talked by Italian women : for the 
gallery was usually crowded with Italians: and I 
listened with a pleasure such as that with which 
°Weld the traveller lay and listened, in Canada, to the 
sweet laughter of Indian women ; for the less you under- lo 
stand of a language, the more sensible you are to the 
melody or harshness of its sounds : for such a purpose, 
therefore, it was an advantage to me that I was a poor 
Italian scholar, reading it but little, and not speaking 
it at all, nor understanding a tenth part of what I 15 
heard spoken. 

These were my Opera pleasures : but another pleas- 
ure I had which, as it could be had only on a Satur- 
day night, occasionally struggled with my love of the 
Opera ; for, at that time, Tuesday and Saturday were 20 
the regular Opera nights. On this subject I am afraid 
I shall be rather obscure, but, I can assure the reader, 
not at all more so than °Marinus in his life of °Proclus, 
or many other biographers and auto-biographers of fair 
reputation. This pleasure, I have said, was to be had 25 



86 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

only on a Saturday night. What then was Saturday 
night to me more than any other night? I had no 
"labours that I rested from; no wages to receive: 
what needed I to care for Saturday night, more than 

5 as it was a summons to hear Grassini ? True, most 
logical reader : what you say is unanswerable. And 
yet so it Avas and is, that, whereas different men throw 
their feelings into different channels, and most are 
apt to show their interest in the concerns of the poor, 

lo chiefly by sympathy, expressed in some shape or other, 
with their distresses and sorrows, I, at that time, was 
disposed to express my interest by sympathising with 
their pleasures. The pains of poverty I had lately 
seen too much of ; more than I wished to remember : 

15 but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of 
spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never 
become oppressive to contemplate. Now Saturday 
night is the season for the chief, regular, and periodic 
return of rest to the poor : in this point the most hos- 

20 tile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of 
brotherhood: almost all Christendom rests from its 
labours. It is a rest introductory to another rest: 
and divided by a whole day and two nights from the 
renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a 

25 Saturday night, as though I also were released from 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 87 • 

some yoke of labour, had some wages to receive, and 
some luxury of repose to enjoy. For the sake, there- 
fore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as possible, 
a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, 
I used often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken 5 
opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the 
direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other 
parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Satur- 
day night, for laying out their wages. Many a family 
party, consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes 10 
one or two of his children, have I listened to, as they 
stood consulting on their ways and means, or the 
strength of their exchequer, or the price of household 
articles. Gradually I became familiar with their 
wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. Some- 15 
times there might be heard murmurs of discontent: 
but far oftener expressions on the countenance, or 
uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquillity. 
And taken generally, I must say, that, in this point at 
least, the poor are far more philosophic than the rich 20 
— that they show a more ready and cheerful submis- 
sion to what they consider as irremediable evils, or 
irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could 
do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their 
parties ; and gave my opinion upon the matter in dis- 25 



88 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

cussion, which, if not always judicious, was always 
received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, 
or expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little 
lower, or it was reported that onions and butter were 
5 expected to fall, I was glad : yet, if the contrary were 
true, I drew from opium some means of consoling 
myself. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its 
materials indiscriminately from roses and from the 
°soot of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into com- 

lo pliance with the master key. Some of these rambles 
led me to great distances : for an opium-eater is too 
happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes 
in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical 
principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seek- 

15 ing ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of 
circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I had 
doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly 
upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmati- 
cal entries, and such sphynx's riddles of streets 

20 without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the 
audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of 
hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at 
times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of 
these °terr(e ijicognitm, and doubted, whether they had 

25 yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 89 

For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant 
years, when the human face tyrannized over my 
dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London 
came back and haunted my sleep, Avith the feeling of 
perplexities vmoral or intellectual, that brought con- 5 
fusion to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the 
conscience. 

Thus I have shown that opium does not, of neces- 
sity, produce inactivity or torpor; but that, on the 
contrary, it often led me into markets and theatres. 10 
Yet, in candour, I will admit that markets and thea- 
tres are not the appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, 
Avhen in the divinest state incident to his enjoyment. 
In that state, crowds become an oppression to him ; 
music even, too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks 15 
solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of 
those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the 
crown and consummation of what opium can do for 
human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate 
too much, and to observe too little, and wdio, upon my 20 
first entrance at college, was nearly falling into a 
deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the suf- 
ferings which I had witnessed in London, was suffi- 
ciently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts 
to do all I could to counteract them. — I was, indeed, 25 



90 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

like a person who, according to the old legend, had 
entered the °cave of Trophonius : and the remedies I 
sought were to force myself into society, and to keep 
my understanding in continual activity upon matters 

5 of science. But for these remedies, I should certainly 
have become hypochondriacally melancholy. In after 
years, however, when my cheerfulness was more fully 
re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for 
a solitary life. And, at that time, I often fell into 

o these reveries upon taking opium ; and more than 
once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when 
I have been at an open window, in a room from which 
I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could 
command a view of the great town of L[iverpool], at 

5 about the same distance, that I have sate from sun-set 

to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move. 

I shall be charged with "mysticism, °Behmenism, 

"quietism, &c. but that shall not alarm me. °Sir H. 

Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest men: and 

o let my reader see if he, in his philosophical works, be 
half as unmystical as I am. -^ I say, then, that it has 
often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat 
typical of what took place in such a reverie. The 
town of L[iverpool] represented the earth, with its 

5 sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 91 

sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting 
but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like 
calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood 
which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then 
first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproas 5 
of life; as if the °tumult, the fever, and the strife, 
were suspended; a respite granted from the secret 
burthens of the heart ; a sabbath of repose ; a "resting 
from human labours. Here were the hopes which 
blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace 10 
which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as 
unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a 
halcyon calm : a tranquillity that seemed no product 
of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal 
antagonisms ; infinite activities, infinite repose. 15 

°0h ! just, subtle, and mighty opium ! that to the 
hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will 
never heal, and for °" the pangs that tempt the spirit 
to rebel," bringest an assuaging balm ; eloquent opium ! 
that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the ]3ur- 20 
poses of wrath ; and to the guilty man, for one night 
givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed 
pure from blood ; and to the proud man, a brief ob- 
livion for 

° Wrongs uiiredress'd, and insults unavenged; 25 



92 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the 
triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses ; and 
confoundest perjury; and dost reverse the sentences 
of unrighteous judges : — thou buiklest upon the bosom 

5 of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, 
cities and temples beyond the art of °Phidias and 
°Praxiteles — beyond the splendour of Babylon and 
°Hekat6nipylos : and °" from the anarchy of dreaming 
sleep," callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried 

lo beauties, and the blessed household countenances 
cleansed from the °" dishonours of the grave." Thou 
only givest these gifts to man ; and thou hast the keys 
of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium ! 

INTEODUCTION TO THE PAINS OF OPIUM 

Courteous, and, I hope, indulgent reader (for all 
15 my readers must be indulgent ones, or else, I fear, I 
shall shock them too much to count on their cour- 
tesy), having accompanied me thus far, now let me 
request you to move onwards, for about eight years ; 
that is to say, from 1804 (when I have said that my 
20 acquaintance with opium first began) to 1812. The 
years of academic life are now over and gone — almost 
forgotten: — the student's cap no longer presses my 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 93 

temples; if my cap exist at all, it presses those of 
some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, 
and as passionate a lover of knowledge. My gown 
is, by this time, I dare to say, in the same condition 
with many thousand excellent books in the °Bodleian, 5 
viz. diligently perused by certain studious moths and, 
worms : or departed, however (which is all that I 
know of his fate), to that great reservoir of somewhere, 
to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea- 
kettles, &c. have departed (not to speak of still frailer 10 
vessels, such as glasses, decanters, bed-makers, &c. 
which occasional resemblances in the present genera- 
tion of tea-cups, &c. remind me of having once pos- 
sessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in 
common with most gownsmen of either university, 15 
could give, I suspect, but an obscure and conjectural 
history. The persecutions of the chapel-bell, sound- 
ing its unwelcome summons to six o'clock matins, 
interrupts my slumbers no longer: the porter who 
rang it, upon whose beautiful nose (bronze, inlaid 20 
with copper) I wrote, in retaliation, so many °Grreek 
epigrams whilst I was dressing, is dead, and has 
ceased to disturb anybody : and I, and many others, 
who suffered much from his tintinnabulous propen- 
sities, have now agreed to overlook his errors, and 25 



94 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

have forgiven him. Even with the bell I am now in 
charity : it rings, I suppose, as formerly, thrice a-day : 
and cruelly annoys, I doubt not, many Avorthy gentle- 
men, and disturbs their peace of mind : but as to me, 
5 in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice no 
longer (treacherous, I call it, for, by some refinement 
of malice, it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if 
it had been inviting one to a party) : its tones have 
no longer, indeed, power to reach me, let the wind sit 

10 as favourable as the malice'of the bell itself could wish : 
for I am 250 miles away from it, and buried in the 
depth of mountains. And what am I doing amongst 
the mountains ? Taking opium. Yes, but what else? 
Why, reader, in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, 

15 as well as for some years previous, I have been chiefly 
studying German metaphysics, in the writings of °Kant, 
°Fichte, °Schelling, &c. And how, and in what manner, 
do I live ? in short, what class or description of men 
do I belong to? I am at this period, viz. in 1812, 

20 living in a cottage ; and with a single female servant 
°(lioni soit qui mal y pense), -who, amongst my neigh- 
bours, passes by the name of my "house-keeper." 
And, as a scholar and a man of learned education, 
and in that sense a gentleman, I may presume to 

25 class myself as an unworthy member of that indefinite 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 95 

body called gentlemen. Partly on the ground I have 
assigned, perhaps ; jjartly because, from my having 
no visible calling or business, it is rightly judged 
that I must be living on my private fortune; I am 
so classed by my neighbours : and, by the courtesy 5 
of modern England, I am usually addressed on letters, 
«&c. esquire, though having, I fear, in the rigorous con- 
struction of heralds, but slender pretensions to that 
distinguished honour: yes, in popular estimation, I 
am °X. Y. Z., esquire, but not Justice of the Peace, 10 
nor °Custos Rotulorum. Am I married ? Not yet. 
And I still take opium ? On Saturday nights. And, 
perhaps, have taken it unblushingly ever since " the 
rainy Sunday," and " the stately Pantheon," and " the 
beatific druggist" of 1804? — Even so. And how do 15 
I find my health after all this opium-eating ? in 
short, how do I do ? Why, pretty well, I thank you, 
reader : in the phrase of ladies in the straw, " as well 
as can be expected." In fact, if I dared to say the 
real and simple truth, though, to satisfy the theories 20 
of medical men, I ought to be ill, I never was better in 
my life than in the spring of 1812 ; and I hope sin- 
cerely, that the quantity of claret, port, or " particular 
Madeira," which, in all probability, you, good reader, 
have taken, and design to take for every term of eight 25 



96 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

years, during your natural life, may as little disorder 
your health as mine was disordered by the opium I 
had taken for eight years, between 1804 and 1812. 
Hence you may see again the danger of taking any 

5 medical advice from Anastasius; in divinity, for aught 
I know, or law, he may be a safe counsellor; but 
not in medicine. No: it is far better to consult Dr. 
Buchan; as I did: for I never forgot that worthy 
man's excellent suggestion: and I was "particularly 

lo careful not to take above five-and-twenty ounces of 
laudanum." To this moderation and temperate use 
of the article, I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, 
at least {i.e. in 1812,) I am ignorant and unsuspicious 
of the avenging terrors which opium has in store for 

15 those who abuse its lenity. At the same time, it 
must not be forgotten, that hitherto I have been only 
a dilettante eater of opium : eight years' practice even, 
with a single precaution of allowing sufficient intervals 
between every indulgence, has not been sufficient to 

20 make opium necessary to me as an article of daily 
diet. But now comes a different era. Move on, if 
you please, reader, to 1813. In the summer of the 
year we have just quitted, I had suffered much in 
bodily health from °distress of mind connected with 

25 a very melancholy event. This event, being no ways 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 97 

related to the subject now before me, further than 
through the bodily illness which it produced, I need 
not more particularly notice. Whether this illness of 
1812 had any share in that of 1813, I know not : but 
so it was, that in the latter year I was attacked by a 5 
most "appalling irritation of the stomach, in all re- 
spects the same as that which had caused me so much 
suffering in youth, and accompanied by a revival of 
all the old dreams. This is the point of my narrative 
on which, as respects my own self-justification, the ro 
whole of what follows may be said to hinge. And 
here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma : — Either, 
on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader's patience, 
by such a detail of my malady, or of my struggles 
with it, as might suffice to establish the fact of my 15 
inability to wrestle any longer with irritation and 
constant suffering : or, on the other hand, by passing 
lightly over this critical part of my story, I must 
forego the benefit of a stronger impression left on 
the mind of the reader, and must lay myself open to 20 
the misconstruction of having slipped by the easy and 
gradual steps of self-indulging persons, from the first 
to the final stage of opium-eating (a misconstruction 
to which there will be a lurking predisposition in 
most readers, from my previous acknowledgements). 25 



98 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

This is the dilemma : the first horn of which would 
be sufficient to toss and gore any column of patient 
readers, though drawn up sixteen deep and constantly 
relieved by fresh men : consequently that is not to be 

5 thought of. It remains, then, that I post-date so much 
as is necessary for my purpose. And let me take as 
full credit for what I postulate as if I had demon- 
-strated it, good reader, at the expense of your patience 
and my own. Be not so ungenerous as to let me suffer 

[0 in your good opinion through my own forbearance and 
regard for your comfort. No : believe all that I ask 
of you, viz. that I could resist no longer, believe it 
liberally, and as an act of grace : or else in mere pru- 
dence : for, if not, then in the next edition of my 

[5 Opium Confessions revised and enlarged, I will make 
you believe and tremble : and °d fo7xe d^enmtyer, by 
mere dint of °pandiculation I will terrify all readers 
of mine from ever again questioning any postulate 
that I shall think fit to make. 

JO This then, let me repeat, I postulate — that, at the 
time I began to take opium daily, I could not have 
done otherwise. Whether, indeed, afterwards I might 
not have succeeded in breaking off the habit, even when 
it seemed to me that all efforts would be unavailing, 

!5 and whether many of the innumerable efforts which I 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 99 

did make, might not have been carried much further 
and my gradual reconquests of ground lost might not 
have been followed up much more energetically — 
these are questions which I must decline. Perhaps I 
might make out a case of ]3alliation ; but, shall I speak 
ingenuously ? I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of 
mine, that I am too much of an ^Eudsemonist : T han- 
ker too much after a state of happiness, both for 
myself and others : I cannot face misery, whether my 
own or not, with an eye of sufficient firmness : and am 
little capable of encountering present pain for the sake 
of any reversionary benefit. On some other matters, 
I can agree with the gentlemen in the cotton trade at 
Manchester in affecting the °Stoic philosophy: but 
not in this. Here I take the liberty of an ^Eclectic 
philosopher, and I look out for some courteous and 
considerate sect that will condescend more to the 
infirm condition of an opium-eater ; that are °' sweet 
men,' as Chaucer says, ' to give absolution,' and will 
show some conscience in the penances they inflict, 
and the efforts of abstinence they exact, from poor 
sinners like myself. An inhuman moralist I can no 
more endure in my nervous state than opium that has 
not been boiled. At any rate, he, who summons me 
to send out a large freight of self-denial and mortifi- 

L. oi o. 



100 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

cation upon any cruising voyage of moral improve- 
ment, must make it clear to my understanding that 
tlie concern is a hopeful one. At my time of life (six- 
and-thirty years of age) it cannot be supposed that I 

5 have much energy to spare : in fact, I find it all little 
enough for the intellectual labours I have on my hands : 
and, therefore, let no man expect to frighten me by a 
few hard words into embarking any part of it upon 
desperate adventures of morality. 

10 Whether desperate or not, however, the issue of the 
struggle in 1813 was what I have mentioned ; and from 
this date, the reader is to consider me as a regular and 
confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask whether on any 
particular day he had or had not taken opium, would 

15 be to ask whether his lungs had performed respiration, 
or the heart fulfilled its functions. — You understand 
now, reader, what I am : and you are by this time 
aware, that .no old gentleman, °" with a snow-white 
beard," will have any chance of persuading me to 

20 surrender '-the little golden receptacle of the perni- 
cious drug." No : I give notice to all, whether moral- 
ists or surgeons, that, whatever be their pretensions 
and skill in their respective lines of practice, they 
must not hope for any countenance from me, if they 

25 think to begin by any savage proposition for a Lent 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 101 

or Ramadan of abstinence from opium. This then 
being all fully understood between us, we shall in 
future sail before the wind. Now then, reader, from 
1813, where all this time we have been sitting down 
and loitering — rise up, if you please, and walk for- 5 
ward about three years more. Now draw up the cur- 
tain, and you shall see me in a new character. 

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he would 
tell us what had been the happiest day in his life, and 
the why, and the wherefore, I suppose that we should 10 
all cry out — Hear him ! Hear him ! — As to the hap- 
piest day, that must be very difficult for any wise man 
to name : because any event, that could occupy so dis- 
tinguished a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or 
be entitled to have shed a special felicity on any one 15 
day, ought to be of such an enduring character, as 
that (accidents ajjart) it should have continued to 
shed the same felicity, or one not distinguishably less, 
on many years together. To the happiest lustrum, 
however, or even to the happiest year, it may be 20 
allowed to any man to point without discountenance 
from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader, was the 
one which we have now reached ; though it stood, I 
confess, as a parenthesis between years of a gloomier 
character. It was a year of brilliant water (to speak 25 



102 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

after the manner of jewellers), set as it were, and 
insulated, in the gloom and cloudy melancholy of 
opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little before 
this time descended suddenly, and without any con- 

5 siderable effort, from 320 grains of opium (i.e. eight 
thousand drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, 
or one eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by 
magic, the cloud of profoundest melancholy which 
rested upon my brain, like some black vapours that I 

[o have seen roll away from the summits of mountains, 
drew off in one day °(vvx07]fx€pov) ; passed off with its 
murky banners as simultaneously as a ship that has 
been stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide — 

°Tliat moveth altogether, if it move at all. 

[5 Now, then, I was again happy : I now took only 
1000 drops of laudanum per day : and what was that ? 
A latter spring had come to close up the season of 
youth : my brain performed its functions as healthily 
as ever before : I read Kant again ; and again I under- 

!o stood him, or fancied that I did. Again my feelings 
of pleasure expanded themselves to all around me: 
and if any man from Oxford or Cambridge, or from 
neither, had been announced to me in my unpretend- 
ing cottage, I should have welcomed him with as 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 103 

sumptuous a reception as so poor a man could offer. 
Whatever else was wanting to a wise man's happiness, 
— of laudanum I would have given him as much as he 
wished, and in a golden cup. And, by the way, now 
that I speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, 5 
about this time, a little incident, which I mention, 
because, trifling as it was, the reader will soon meet 
it again in my dreams, which it influenced more fear- 
fully than could be imagined. One day a Malay 
knocked at my door. What business a Malay could 10 
have to transact amongst English mountains, I cannot 
conjecture : but possibly he was on his road to a sea- 
port about forty miles distant. 

The servant who opened the door to him was a 
young girl born and bred amongst the mountains, who 15 
had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort : his tur- 
ban, therefore, confounded her not a little : and, as it 
turned out, that his attainments in English were ex- 
actly of the same extent as hers in the Malay, there 
seemed to be an °impassable gulph fixed between all 20 
communication of ideas, if either party had happened 
to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting 
the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, 
giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages 
of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar ones), 25 



104 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

came and gave me to understand that there was a sort 
of demon below, whom she clearly imagined that my 
art could exorcise from the house. I did not immedi- 
ately go down : but, when I did, the group which 
5 presented itself, arranged as it was by accident, though 
not very elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye 
in a way that none of the statuesque attitudes exhib- 
ited in the ballets at the Opera House, though so 
ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a cottage 

lo kitchen, but panelled on the wall with dark wood that 
from age and rubbing resembled oak, and looking more 
like a rustic hall of entrance than a kitchen, stood the 
Malay — his turban and loose trousers of dingy white 
relieved upon the dark panelling : he had placed him- 

15 self nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish; 
though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity con- 
tended with the feeling of simple awe which her 
countenance expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat 
before her. And a more striking picture there could 

20 not be imagined, than the beautiful English face of 
the girl, and its exquisite fairness, together with her 
erect and independent attitude, contrasted with the 
sallow and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or 
veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his small, 

25 fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and ad- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 105 

orations. Half-hidden by the ferocious looking Malay, 
was a little child from a neighbouring cottage who had 
crept in after him, and was now in the act of revert- 
ing its head, and gazing upwards at the turban and 
the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he 5 
caught at the dress of the young woman for protection. 
My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not remark- 
ably extensive, being indeed confined to two words — 
the Arabic word for barley, and the Turkish for opium 
(madjoon), which I have learned from Anastasius. 10 
And, as I had neither a Malay dictionary, nor even 
°Adelung's Mithridates, which might have helped me 
to a few words, I addressed him in some lines from 
the Iliad ; considering that, of such languages as I pos- 
sessed, Greek, in point of longitude, came geographi- 15 
cally nearest to an Oriental one. He worshipped me 
in a most devout manner, and replied in what I sup- 
pose was Malay. In this way I saved my reputation 
with my neighbours; for the Malay had no micans 
of betraying the secret. He lay down upon the floor 20 
for about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On 
his departure, I presented him with a piece of opium. 
To him, as an Orientalist, I concluded that opium 
must be familiar ; and the expression of his face con- 
vinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck with 21; 



106 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

some little coiisternation when I saw him suddenly 
raise his hand to his month, and (in the school-boy 
phrase) bolt the whole, divided into three pieces, at 
one mouthful. The quantity was enough to kill three 
5 dragoons and their horses : and I felt some alarm for 
the poor creature : but what could be done ? I had 
given him the opium in compassion for his solitary 
life, on recollecting that if he had travelled on foot 
from London, it must be nearly three weeks since he 

lo could have exchanged a thought with any human 
being. I could not think of violating the laws of 
hospitality by having him seized and drenched with 
an emetic, and thus frightening him into a notion that 
we were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. 

15 ^o: there was clearly no help for it: — he took his 
leave : and for some days I felt anxious : but as I 
never heard of any Malay being found dead, I became 
convinced that he was used to opium : and that I must 
have done him the service I designed, by giving him 

20 one night of respite from the pains of wandering. 

This incident I have digressed to mention, because 
this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he 
assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected 
with his image for some days) fastened afterwards 

25 upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 107 

worse than himself, that ran ° " a-nuick '^ at me, and 
led me into a world of troubles. — But to quit this 
episode, and to return to my intercalary year of happi- 
ness. 1 have said already, that on a subject so impor- 
tant to us all as happiness, we should listen with 5 
pleasure to any man's experience or experiments, even 
though he were but a plough-boy, who cannot be sup- 
posed to have ploughed very deep into such an intrac- 
table soil as that of human pains and pleasures, or to 
have conducted his researches upon any very enlight- 10 
ened principles. But I, who have taken happiness, 
both in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and 
unboiled, both East India and Turkey — who have 
conducted my experiments upon this interesting sub- 
ject with a sort of galvanic battery — and have, for 15 
the general benefit of the world, inoculated myself, as 
it were, with the poison of 8000 drops of laudanum 
per day (just, for the same reason, as a French surgeon 
inoculated himself lately with cancer — an English one, 
twenty years ago, with plague — and a third, I know 20 
not of wdiat nation, with hydrophobia), — / (it will 
be admitted) must surely know what happiness is, if 
anybody does. And, therefore, I will here lay down 
an analysis of happiness ; and as the most interesting 
mode of communicating it, I will give it, not didacti- 25 



108 CONFL'SSIOJVS OF AN 

cally, but wrapped up and involved in a picture of one 
evening, as I spent every evening during the interca- 
lary year when laudanum, though taken daily, was to 
me no more than the elixir of pleasure. This done, I 
5 shall quit the subject of happiness altogether, and pass 
to a very different one — the pains of opium. 

Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 
miles from any town — no spacious valley, but about 
two miles long by three quarters of a mile in average 

10 width ; the benefit of which- provision is, that all the 
family resident within its circuit will compose, as it 
were, one larger household personally familiar to your 
eye, and more or less interesting to your affections. 
Let the mountains be real mountains, between 3 and 

15 4000 feet high; and the cottage, a real cottage; not 
(as a witty author has it) ° " a cottage with a double 
coach-house : " let it be, in fact (for I must abide by 
the actual scene), a white cottage, embowered with 
flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession 

20 of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the 
windows through all the months of spring, summer, 
and autumn — beginning, in fact, with May roses, and 
ending with jasmine. Let it, however, not be spring, 
nor summer, nor autumn — but winter, in his sternest 

25 shape. This is a most important point in the science 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 109 

of happiness. And I am surprised to see people over- 
look it, and think it matter of congratulation that 
winter is going ; or, if coming, is not likely to be a 
severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annu- 
ally, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind 
or other, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely 
everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which at- 
tend a winter fire-side : candles at four o'clock, warm 
hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, cur- 
tains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst 
the wind and rain are raging audibly without, 

°And at the doors and windows seem to call, 
As heav'n and earth they would together mell ; 
Yet the least entrance find they none at all ; 
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall. 

— Castle of Indolence. 

All these are items in the description of a winter 
evening, which must surely be familiar to every body 
born in a high latitude. And it is evident, that most 
of these delicacies, like ice-cream, require a very low 
temperature of the atmosphere to produce them : they 
are fruits which cannot be ripened without weather 
stormy or inclement, in some way or other. I am not 
'^ particular, ^^ as people say, whether it be snow, or 
black frost, or wind so strong, that (as °Mr. [Clarkson] 



110 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

says) "you may lean your back against it like a post,'' 
1 can put up even with rain, provided it rains cats 
and dogs : but something of the sort I must have : 
and, if I have it not, I think myself in a manner ill- 
used : for why am I called on to pay so heavily for 
winter, in coals, and candles, and various privations 
that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am not to have 
the article good of its kind ? No : a Canadian winter 
for my money : or a Eussian one, where every man is 
but a co-proprietor with the north wind in the fee- 
simple of his own ears. Indeed, so great an epicure 
am I in this matter, that I cannot relish a winter 
night fully if it. be much past °St. Thomas's day, and 
have degenerated into disgusting tendencies to vernal 
appearances : no : it must be divided by a thick wall 
of dark nights from all return of light and sunshine. 
— From the latter weeks of October to Christmas 
Eve, therefore, is the period during which happiness 
is in season, which, in my judgment, enters the room 
with the tea-tray : for tea, though ridiculed by those 
who are naturally of coarse nerves, or are become so 
from wine-drinking, and are not susceptible of in- 
fluence from so refined a stimulant, will always be 
the favourite beverage of the intellectual : and, for 
my part, I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a %eUum 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 111 

internecimmi against °Joiias Hanway, or any other 
impious person, who shoukl presume to disparage it. 
— But here, to save myself the trouble of too much 
verbal description, I will introduce a painter; and give 
him directions for the rest of the picture. Painters 
do not like white cottages, unless a good deal weather- 
stained : but as the reader now understands that it is 
a winter night, his services will not be required, ex- 
cept for the inside of the house. 

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, 
and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, 
reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, 
the drawing-room : but, being contrived °" a double 
debt to pay," it is also, and more justly, termed the 
library ; for it happens that books are the only article 
of property in which I am richer than my neighbours. 
Of these, I have about five thousand, collected grad- 
ually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, 
put as many as you can into this room. Make it 
populous with books: and, furthermore, paint me a 
good fire; and furniture plain and modest, befitting 
the unpretending cottage of a scholar. And, near the 
fire, paint me a tea-table ; and (as it is clear that no 
creature can come to see one such a stormy night,) 
place only two cups and saucers on the tea-tray : and. 



112 COJSrFESSIONS OF AN 

if you know how to paint siicli a thing symboli- 
cally, or otherwise, paint me an eternal tea-pot — 
eternal °ci parte ante, and °cl parte post ; for I usually 
drink tea from eight o'clock at night to four o'clock 

5 in the morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make 
tea, or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a lovely 
young woman, sitting at the table. Paint her arms 
like "Aurora's and her smiles like °Hebe's : — But no, 
dear M [argaret], not even in jest let me insinuate that 

o thy power to illuminate my cottage rests upon a tenure 
so perishable as mere personal beauty ; or that the 
witchcraft of angelic smiles lies within the empire of 
any earthly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to 
something more within its power : and the next article 

5 brought forward should naturally be myself — a i)ic- 
ture of the Opium-eater, with his "little golden re- 
ceptacle of the pernicious drug," lying beside him on 
the table. As to the opium, I have no objection to 
see a picture of that, though I would rather see the 

JO original : you may paint it, if you choose ; but I 
apprize you, that no " little '' receptacle would, even 
in 1816, answer my purpose, who was at a distance 
from the " stately Pantheon," and all druggists (mortal 
or otherwise). No: you may as well paint the real 

25 receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 113 

as much like a wine-decanter as possible. Into this 
you may put a quart of ruby -coloured laudanum : that, 
and a book of German metaphysics placed by its side, 
will sufficiently attest my being in the neighbour- 
hood; but, as to myself, — there I demur. I admit 5 
that, naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground of 
the picture ; that being the hero of the piece, or (if 
you choose) the criminal at the bar, my body should 
be had into court. This seems reasonable : but why 
should I confess, on this point, to a painter ? or why 10 
confess at all ? If the public (into whose private ear 
I am confidentially whispering my confessions, and 
not into any painter's) should chance to have framed 
some agreeable picture for itself, of the Opium-eater's 
exterior, — should have ascribed to him, romantically, 15 
an elegant person, or a handsome face, why should I 
barbarously tear from it so pleasing a delusion — 
pleasing both to the public and to me ? No : paint 
me, if at all, according to your own fancy : and, as a 
painter's fancy should teem with beautiful creations, 20 
I cannot fail, in that way, to be a gainer. And now, 
reader, we have run through all the °ten categories of 
my condition, as it stood about 1816-17 : up to the 
middle of which latter year I judge myself to have 
been a happy man : and the elements of that happi- 25 



114 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ness I have endeavoured to place before you, in the 
above sketch of the interior of a scholar's library, in 
a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy winter 
evening. 

5 °But now farewell — a long farewell to happiness — 
winter or summer ! ^Farewell to smiles and laughter! 
Farewell to peace of mind ! Farewell to hope and to 
tranquil dreams, and to the blessed consolations of 
sleep ! For more than three years and a half I am 

to summoned away from these : I am now arrived at an 
°Iliad of woes : for I have now to record 

THE PAINS OF OPIUM. 

° — As when some great painter dips 
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. 

Shelley's Bevolt of Islam. 

Eeader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must 
[5 request your attention to a brief explanatory note on 
three points : 

1. For several reasons, I have not been able to 

compose the notes for this part of my narrative into 

any regular and connected shape. I give the notes 

20 disjointed as I find them, or have now drawn them 

up from memory. Some of them point to their own 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 115 

date ; some I have dated ; and some are undated. 
Whenever it could answer my purpose to transplant 
them from the natural or chronological order, I have 
not scrupled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the pres- 
ent, sometimes in the x^ast tense. Few of the notes, 5 
perhaps, were written exactly at the period of time 
to which they relate ; but this can little affect their 
accuracy ; as the impressions were such that they can 
never fade from my mind. Much has been omitted. 
I could not, without effort, constrain myself to the 10 
task of either recalling, or constructing into a regular 
narrative, the whole burthen of horrors which lies 
upon my brain. This feeling partly I plead in excuse, 
and partly that I am now in London, and am a help- 
less sort of person, who cannot even arrange his own 15 
papers without assistance ; and I am separated from 
the hands which are wont to perform for me the offices 
of an amanuensis. 

2. You will think, perhaps, that I am too confiden- 
tial and communicative of my own private history. It 20 
may be so. But my way of writing is rather to think 
aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to con- 
sider who is listening to me ; and if I stop to consider 
what is proper to be said to this or that person, I 
shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is 25 



116 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

proper. The fact is, I place myself at a distance of 
fifteen or twenty years ahead of this time, and sup- 
pose myself writing to those who will be interested 
about me hereafter ; and wishing to have some record 
5 of time, the entire history of which no one can know 
but myself, I do it as fully as I am able with the 
efforts I am now capable of making, because I know 
not whether I can ever find time to do it again. 

3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did I not 

10 release myself from the horrors of opium, by leaving 

it off, or diminishing it ? To this I must answer 

briefly: it might be supposed that I yielded to the 

fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be sup- 

. posed that any man can be charmed by its terrors. 

15 The reader may be sure, therefore, that I made at- 
tempts innumerable to reduce the quantity. I add, 
that those who witnessed the agonies of those at- 
tempts, and not myself, were the first to beg me to 
desist. But could not have I reduced it a drop a 

20 day, or by adding water, have bisected or trisected a 
drop ? A thousand drops bisected would thus have 
taken nearly six years to reduce ; and that way would 
certainly not have answered. But this is a common 
mistake of those who know nothing of opium experi- 

25 mentally ; I appeal to those who do, whether it is not 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 111 

always found that down to a certain point it can be 
reduced with ease and even pleasure, but that, after 
that point, further reduction causes intense suffer- 
ing. Yes, say many thoughtless persons, who know 
not what they are talking of, you will suffer a little 
low spirits and dejection for a few days. I answer, 
no ; there is nothing like low spirits ; on the contrary, 
the mere animal spirits are uncommonly raised: the 
pulse is improved: the health is better. It is not 
there that the suffering lies. It has no resemblance 
to the sufferings caused by renouncing wine. It is a 
state of unutterable irritation of stomach (which surely 
is not much like dejection), accompanied by intense 
perspirations, and feelings such as I shall not attempt 
to describe without more space at my command. 

I shall now enter °" in medias res" and shall antici- 
pate, from a time when my opium pains might be said 
to be at their acme, an account of their palsying effects 
on the intellectual faculties. 



My studies have now been long interrupted. I can- 
not read to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a 
moment's endurance. Yet I read aloud sometimes for 
the pleasure of others ; because, reading is an accom- 
plishment of mine ; and, in the slang use of the word 



118 CONFi:SSIONS OF AN 

accomplishment as a superficial and ornamental attain- 
ment, almost the only one I possess : and formerly, if 
I had any vanity at all connected with any endow- 
ment or attainment of mine, it was with this ; for I 

5 had observed that no accomplishment was so rare. 
Players are the worst readers of all: °[John Kemble] 
reads vilely: and °Mrs. [Siddons], who is so cele- 
brated, can read nothing well but dramatic composi- 
tions : Milton she cannot read sufferably. People in 

lo general either read poetry without any passion at all, 
or else °overstep the modesty of nature, and read not 
like scholars. Of late, if I have felt moved by any- 
thing in books, it has been by the °grand lamentations 
of Samson Agonistes, or the °great harmonies of the 

15 Satanic speeches in Paradise Kegained, when read 
aloud by myself. A °young lady sometimes comes 
and drinks tea with us: at her request and M[ar- 
garet]'s, I now and then read W[ordsworth]'s poems 
to them. (W[ords worth], by the bye, is the only poet 

20 I ever met who could read his own verses : often 
indeed he reads admirably.) 

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book 
but one : and I owe it to the author, in discharge of a 
great debt of gratitude, to mention what that was. 

25 The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 119 

as I have said, by snatches, and occasionally. But 
my proper vocation, as I well knew, was the exercise 
of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most 
part, analytic studies are continuous, and not to be 
pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. 5 
^lathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, 
&c. were all become insupportable to me ; I shrunk 
from them with a sense of powerless and infantine 
feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from 
remembering the time when I grappled with them to 10 
my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, 
because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, 
and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, 
to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one 
single work, to which I had presumed to give the 15 
title of an unfinished work of °Spinosa's ; viz. De 
emendatione hamani intellectus. This was now lying 
locked up, as by frost, like any "Spanish bridge or 
aqueduct, begun upon too great a scale for the 
resources of the architect; and, instead of surviving 20 
me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspira- 
tions, and a life of labour dedicated to the exaltation 
of human nature in that way in which God had best 
fitted me to promote so great an object, it was likely 
to stand a memorial to my children of hopes defeated, 25 



120 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

of baffled efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, 
of foundations laid that were never to support a super- 
structure, — of the grief and the ruin of the architect. 
In this state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, 
turned my attention to political economy ; my under- 
standing, which formerly had been as active and rest- 
less as a hyaena, could not, I suppose (so long as I 
lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political 
economy offers this advantage to a person in my state, 
that though it is eminently an organic science (no 
part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole, as 
the whole again re-acts on each part), yet the several 
parts may be detached and contemplated singly. 
Great as was the prostration of my powers at this 
time, yet I could not forget my knowledge ; and my 
understanding had been for too many years intimate 
with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters 
of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness 
of the main herd of modern economists. I had been 
led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets 
on many branches of economy ; and, at my desire, 
M[argaret] sometimes read to me chapters from more 
recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I 
saw that these were generally the very dregs and 
rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 121 

of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with 
a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole 
academy of modern economists, and throttle them 
between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, 
or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady's 5 
fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent 
me down °Mr. Ricardo's book : and recurring to my own 
prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator 
for this science, I said, before I had finished the first 
chapter, ° " Thou art the man ! " Wonder and curiosity 10 
were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I 
wondered once more : I wondered at myself that I could 
once again be stimulated to the effort of reading : and 
much more I wondered at the book. Had this pro- 
found work been really written in England during the 15 
nineteenth century ? Was it possible ? I supposed 
"thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be 
that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, 
but oppressed by "mercantile and senatorial cares, had 
accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and 20 
a century of thought, had failed even to advance by 
one hair's breadth? All other writers had been 
crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of 
facts and documents; Mr. Eicardo had deduced, °d 
priori, from the understanding itself, laws which 25 



122 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of 
materials, and had constructed what had been but a 
collection of tentative discussions into a science of 
regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal 
basis. 

Thus did one single work of a profound under- 
standing avail to give me a pleasure and an activity 
which I had not known for years : — it roused me 
even to write, or at least to dictate, what M[argaret] 
wrote for me. It seemed to me, that some important 
truths had escaped even °" the inevitable eye" of Mr. 
Ricardo : and as these were, for the most part, of such 
a nature that 1 could express or illustrate them more 
briefly and elegantly by algebraic symbols than in 
the usual clumsy and loitering diction of economists, 
the whole w^ould not have filled a pocket-book; and 
being so brief, with M[argaret] for my amanuensis, 
even at this time, incapable as I was of all general 
exertion, I drew up my Prolegomena to all future 
/Si/stetns of Political Economy. I hope it will not be 
found redolent of opium; though, indeed, to most 
people, the subject is a sufficient opiate. 

This exertion, however, was but a temporary flash ; 
as the sequel showed — for I designed to publish my 
work : arrangements were made at a provincial press, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 123 

about eighteen miles distant, for printing it. An 
additional compositor was retained, for some days, 
on this account. The work was even twice adver- 
tised : and I was, in a manner, pledged to the fulfil- 
ment of my intention. But I had a preface to write ; 5 
and a dedication, which I wished to make a splendid 
one, to Mr. Ricardo. I found myself quite unable to 
accomplish all this. The arrangements were counter- 
manded: the compositor dismissed: and my " Prolego- 
mena" rested peacefully by the side of its elder and 10 
more dignified brother. 

I have thus described and illustrated my intel- 
lectual torpor, in terms that apply more or less to 
every part of the four years during which I was under 
the °Circean spells of opium. But for misery and 15 
suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a 
dormant state. I seldom could prevail on myself to 
write a letter ; an answer of a few words, to any 
that I received, was the utmost that I could accom- 
plish; and often that not until the letter had lain 20 
weeks, or even months, on my writing table. With- 
out the aid of M[argaret] all records of bills paid or 
to he paid must have perished : and my whole domes- 
tic economy, whatever became of Political Economy, 
must have gone into irretrievable confusion. — I shall 25 



124 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

not afterwards allude to this part of the case : it is 
one, however, which the opium-eater will find, in the 
end, as oppressive and tormenting as any other, from 
the sense of incapacity and feebleness, from the direct 

5 embarrassments incident to the neglect or procrasti- 
nation of each day's approj)riate duties, and from the 
remorse which must often exasperate the stings of 
these evils to a reflective and conscientious mind. 
The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities, 

10 or aspirations: he wishes and longs, as earnestly as 
ever, to realize what he believes possible, and feels 
to be exacted by duty ; but his intellectual apprehen- 
sion of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, 
not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. 

15 He lies under the weight of incubus and night-mare: 
he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, 
just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mor- 
tal languor of a relaxing disease, who is compelled to 
witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his 

20 tenderest love: — he curses the spells which chain 
him down from motion : — he would lay down his 
life if he might but get up and walk ; but he is 
powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to 
rise. 

25 I now pass to what is the main subject of these 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 125 

latter confessions, to the history and journal of what 
took place in my dreams ; for these were the imme- 
diate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering. 

The first notice I had of any important change 
going on in this part of my ^Dhysical economy, was 5 
from the re-awakening of a state of eye generally 
incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability, 
I know not whether my reader is aware that many 
children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as 
it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms ; in 10 
some, that power is simply a mechanic affection of 
the eye ; others have a voluntary, or a semi-voluntary 
power to dismiss or to summon them ; or, as a child 
once said to me when I questioned him on this mat- 
ter, °" I can tell them to go, and they go ; but some- 15 
times they come, when I don't tell them to come." 
Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlim- 
ited a command over apparitions, as a Koman centu- 
rion over his soldiers. — In the middle of 1817, I 
think it was, that this faculty became positively 20 
distressing to me : at night, when I lay awake in 
bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp ; 
°friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings 
were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn 
from times before °(li]dipus or °Priam — before °Tyre — 25 



126 aoxFESSiuNS of an 

before "Memphis. And, at tlie same time a corre- 
sponding change took place in my dreams ; a theatre 
seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my 
brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more 
5 than earthly splendour. And the four following facts 
may be mentioned, as noticeable at this time : 

1. That, as the creative state of the eye increased, 
a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and 
the dreaming states of the brain in one point — that 

10 whatsoever I happened to. call up and to trace by a 
voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to 
transfer itself to my dreams ; so that I feared to 
exercise this faculty ; for, as Midas turned all things 
to gold, that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his 

15 human desires, so whataeever things capable of being 
visually represented I did but think of in the dark- 
ness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms 
of the eye ; and, by a process apparently no less in- 
evitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary 

20 colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were 
drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into 
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart. 

2. For this, and all other changes in my dreams, 
were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy 

25 melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 127 

words. I seemed every night to descend, not meta- 
phorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and 
sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it 
seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor 
did I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended. This 5 
I do not dwell upon; because the state of gloom 
which attended these gorgeous spectacles, amounting 
at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal despon- 
dency, cannot be approached by words. 

3. The sense of space, and in the end, the sense 1° 
of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, 
landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast 

as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space 
swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutter- 
able infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so 15 
much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes 
seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one 
night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of 
a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a 
duration far beyond the limits of any human ex- 20 
perience. 

4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgot- 
ten scenes of later years, were often revived : I could 
not be said to recollect them ; for if I had been told 

of them when waking, I should not have been able 25 



128 con'fessio:n's of an 

to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. 
But placed as they were before me, in dreams like 
intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circum- 
stances and accompanying feelings, I recogyiised them 
5 instantaneously. I was once told by a °near relative 
of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a 
river, and being on the very verge of death but for 
the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in 
a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, 

lo arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; 
and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for com- 
prehending the whole and every part. This, from 
some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I 
have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in 

15 modern books, and accompanied by a remark which 
I am convinced is true; viz. that the °dread book of 
account, which the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, the 
mind itself of each individual. Of this at least, I 
feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting 

20 possible to the mind ; a thousand accidents may, and 
will interpose a veil between our present conscious- 
ness and the secret inscriptions on the mind; acci- 
dents of the same sort will also rend away this veil ; 
but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription 

25 remains for ever ; just as the stars seem to with- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 129 

draw before the "common light of day, whereas, in 
fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn 
over them as a veil — and that they are waiting to be 
revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have with- 
drawn. 5 

Having noticed these four facts as memorably dis- 
tinguishing my dreams from those of health, I shall 
now cite a case illustrative of the first fact; and shall 
then cite any others that I remember, either in their 
chronological order, or any other that may give them lo 
more effect as pictures to the reader. 

I had been in youth, and even since, for occasional 
amusement, a great reader of °Livy, whom, I confess, 
that I prefer, both for style and matter, to any other 
of the Roman historians: and I had often felt as 15 
most solemn and appalling sounds, and most emphati- 
cally representative of the majesty of the Eoman 
people, the two words so often occurring in Livy — 
Consul Eomanus ; especially when the consul is in- 
troduced in his military character. I mean to say 20 
that the words king — sultan — regent, &c. or any 
other titles of those who embody in their own persons 
the collective majesty of a great people, had less 
power over my reverential feelings. I had also, 
though no great reader of history, made myself min- 25 



130 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

utely and critically familipa' with one period of Eng- 
lish history, viz. the period of the Parliamentary War, 
having been attracted by the moral grandeur of some 
who figured in that day, and by the many interesting 
memoirs which survive those unquiet times. Both 
these parts of my lighter reading, having furnished 
me often with matter of reflection, now furnished me 
with matter for my dreams. Often I used to see, 
after painting upon the blank darkness a sort of re- 
hearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps 
a festival, and dances. And I heard it said, or I said to 
myself, " These are English ladies from the unhappy 
times of Charles I. These are the wives and the 
daughters of those who met in peace, and sate at the 
same table, and were allied by marriage or by blood ; 
and yet, after a ^certain day in August, 1642, never 
smiled upon each other again, nor met but in the field 
of battle; and at °Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at 
Naseby cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel sabre, 
and washed away in blood the memory of ancient 
friendship." — The ladies danced, and looked as lovely 
as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, even in my 
dream, that they had been in the grave for nearly two 
centuries. — This pageant would suddenly dissolve: 
and, at a clapping of hands would be heard the heart- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 131 

quaking sound of Consul Bomanus : and immediately 
came °" sweeping by," in gorgeous paludaments, 
°Paulus or Marius, girt round by a company of cen- 
turions, with the crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, 
and followed by the °aIalagmos of the Roman legions. 5 

Many years ago, when I was looking over °Piranesi's 
Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing 
by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called 
his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own 
visions during the delirium of a fever : Some of them 10 
(I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's ac- 
count) represented vast Gothic halls : on the floor of 
which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, 
cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive 
of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. 15 
Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceive a 
staircase ; and upon it, groping his way upwards, w^as 
Piranesi himself : follow the stairs a little further, and 
you perceive it come to a sudden and abrupt termina- 
tion, without any balustrade, and allowing no step 20 
onwards to him who had reached the extremity, 
except into the depths below. Whatever is to become 
of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours 
must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, 
and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on 25 



132 CON-FESSIONS OF AN 

which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time stand- 
ing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate 
your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is 
beheld : and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspir- 
ing labours : and so on, until the unfinished stairs and 
Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. 
— With the same power of endless growth and self- 
reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. 
In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of 
my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural : and I 
beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never 
yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. 
From °a great modern poet I cite part of a passage 
which describes, as an appearance actually beheld in 
the clouds, what in many of its circumstances I saw 
frequently in sleep : 

The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
A wilderness of building, sinking far 
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, 
Far sinking into splendor— without end ! 
Fabric it seem'd of diamond, and of gold. 
With alabaster domes, and silver spires, 
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright 
In avenues disposed ; there towers begirt 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 133 

With battlements that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
Upon the dark materials of the storm 
Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves, 
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
The vapours had receded, — taking there 
Their station under a cerulean sky. &c. &c. 

The sublime circumstance — "battlements that on 
their restless fronts bore stars," — might have been 
copied from my architectural dreams, for it often 
occurred. — We hear it reported of °Dryden and of 
°Fuseli, in modern times, that they thought proper 
to eat raw meat for the sake of obtaining splendid 
dreams : how much better for such a purpose to have 
eaten opium, which yet I do not remember that any 
poet is recorded to have done, except the dramatist 
°Shadwell : and in ancient days, °Homer is, I think, 
rightly reputed to have known the virtues of opium. 

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes — 
and silvery expanses of water: — these haunted me so 
much that I feared (though possibly it will appear ludi- 
crous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or 
tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to 
use a metaphysical word) objective ; and the sentient 
organ project itself as its own object. — For two months 



134 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

I have suffered greatly in my head, — a part of my bod- 
ily structure which had hitherto been so clear from all 
touch or taint of weakness (physically, I mean), that I 
used to say of it, as °the last Lord Orford said of his 
stomach, that it seemed likely to survive the rest of 
my person. — Till now I had never felt a head-ach even, 
or any the slightest pain, except rheumatic pains caused 
by my own folly. However, I got over this attack, 
"though it must have been verging on something very 
dangerous. 

The waters now changed their character, — from 
translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now be- 
came seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous 
change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, 
through many months, promised an abiding torment ; 
and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of 
my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in 
my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special 
power of tormenting. But now that which I have called 
the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. 
Perhaps some part of my London life might be answer- 
able for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon 
the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began 
to appear : the sea appeared paved with innumerable 
faces, upturned to the heavens : faces, imploring, wrath- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 135 

ful, despairing, surged upward by thousands, by myr- 
iads, by generations, by centuries : — my agitation 
was infinite, — my mind tossed — and surged with the 
ocean. 



May, 1818. 
The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. 
I have been every night, through his means, transported 
into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share 
in my feelings on this point ; but I have often thought 
that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live 
in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of 
life and scenery, I should go mad. °The causes of my 
horror lie deep ; and some of them must be common to 
others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful 
images and associations. As the cradle of the hnman 
race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling 
connected with it. But there are other reasons. No 
man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capri- 
cious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes else- 
where, affect him in the Avay that he is affected by the 
ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of 
Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, 
of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c. is so 
impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name 



1.3G confjlSsions of an 

overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A 
young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man re- 
newed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any 
knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder at 
the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, 
and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts 
of time ; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names 
of the Ganges, or the Euphrates. It contributes much 
to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been 
for thousands of years, the part of the earth most 
swarming with human life ; the great °officina gentium. 
Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires also, 
in which the enormous population of Asia has always 
been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings asso- 
ciated with all Oriental names or images. In China, 
over and above what it has in common with the rest of 
southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by 
the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and 
want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings 
deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with 
lunatics, or brute animals. All this, and much more 
than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must 
enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable 
horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery, and 
mythological tortures, impressed upon me. Under the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 137 

connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sun- 
lights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, 
reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, 
that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled 
them together in China or Indostan. From kindred 5 
feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under 
the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, 
chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. 
I ran into pagodas : and was fixed, for centuries, at the 
summit or in secret rooms ; I was the idol ; I was the 10 
priest ; I was worshipped ; I was sacrificed. I fled 
from the wrath of °Brama through all the forests of 
Asia : °Vishnu hated me : °Seeva laid wait for me. I 
came suddenly upon °Isis and °Osiris : I had done a 
deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trem- 15 
bled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone 
coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow cham- 
bers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, 
with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles ; and laid, con- 
founded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst 20 
reeds and Nilotic mud. 

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of 
my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such 
amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror 
seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. 25 



138 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Sooner or later, came a reflux of feeling that swal- 
lowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much 
in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. 
Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and 

5 dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity 
and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of 
madness. Into these dreams only, it was, with one 
or two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of 
physical horror entered. All before had been moral 

to and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were 
ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles; especially the 
last. The cursed crocodile became to me the object 
of more horror than almost all the rest. I was com- 
pelled to live with him ; and (as was always the case 

15 almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped some- 
times, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane 
tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sophas, &c. 
soon became instinct with life : the abominable head 
of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at 

20 me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions : and I 
stood loathing and fascinated., And so often did this 
hideous reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the 
very same dream was broken up in the very same way: 
I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear every- 

25 thing when I am sleeping) ; and instantly I awoke : 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 139 

it was broad noon ; and my children were standing, 
hand in hand, at my bed-side ; come to show me 
their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see 
them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful 
was the transition from the damned crocodile, and 5 
the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my 
dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and 
of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion 
of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed 
their faces. 10 

June, 1819. 
I have had occasion to remark, at various periods 
of my life, that the deaths of those whom we love, 
and indeed the contemplation of death generally, is 
°{ccBteris paribus) more affecting in summer than in 
any other season of the year. And the reasons are 15 
these three, I think : first, that the visible heavens in 
summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such 
a solecism may be excused) more infinite ; the clouds, 
by which chiefly the eye expounds the distance of 
the blue pavilion stretched over our heads, are in 20 
summer more voluminous, massed, and accumulated 
in far grander and more towering piles : secondly, the 
light and the appearances of the declining and the 
setting sun are much more fitted to be types and 



140 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

characters of the Infinite : and, thirdly, (which is tlie 
main reason) the exuberant and riotous prodigality of 
life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon 
the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry 
5 sterility of the grave. For it may be observed, gen- 
erally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to 
each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it 
were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to suggest 
each other. On these accounts it is that I find it 

lo impossible to banish the thought of death when I am 
walking alone in the endless days of summer; and 
any particular death, if not more affecting, at least 
haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly 
in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight 

15 incident which I omit, might have been the imme- 
diate occasions of the following dream ; to which, 
however, a predisposition must always have existed 
in my mind; but having been once roused it never 
left me, and split into a thousand fantastic varieties, 

20 which often suddenly re-united, and composed again 
the original dream. 

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, 
that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in 
the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at 

25 the door of my own cottage. Eight before me lay the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 141 

very scene which could really be commanded from that 
situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by 
the power of dreams. There were the same mountains, 
and the same lovely valley at their feet ; but the moun- 
tains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there 
was interspace far larger between them of meadows 
and forest lawns ; the hedges were rich with white 
roses; and no living creature was to be seen, except- 
ing that in the green church-yard there were cattle 
tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and par- 
ticularly round about the grave of a °child whom I 
had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, 
a little before sun-rise in the same summer, when that 
child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and 
I said aloud (as I thought) to myself, " It yet wants 
much of sun-rise ; and it is Easter Sunday ; and that 
is the day on which they celebrate the °first fruits of 
resurrection. °1 will walk abroad ; old griefs shall be 
forgotten to-day ; for the air is cool and still, and the 
hill are high, and stretch away to Heaven; and the 
forest-glades are as quiet as the church-yard ; and 
with the dew I can wash the fever from my fore- 
head, and then I shall be unhappy no longer." And 
I turned, as if to open my garden gate ; and immedi- 
ately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but 



142 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

which yet the power of dreams had reconciled into 
harmony with the other. The scene was an Orien- 
tal one ; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and 
very early in the morning. And at a vast distance 
5 were visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes 
and cupolas of a great city — an image or faint ab- 
straction, caught perhaps in childhood from some 
picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, 
upon a stone and °shaded by Judean palms, there sat 

10 a woman; and I looked; and it was — Ann! She 
fixed her eyes upon me earnestly ; and I said to her 
at length: "So then I have found you at last." I 
waited : but she answered me not a word. Her face 
was the same as when I saw it last, and yet again 

15 how different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp- 
light fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed 
her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not polluted), her 
eyes were streaming with tears : °the tears were now 
wiped away ; she seemed more beautiful than she 

20 was at that time, but in all other points the same, 
and not older. Her looks were tranquil, but with 
unusual solemnity of expression ; and I now gazed 
upon her with some awe ; but suddenly her counte- 
nance grew dim, and, turning to the mountains, I 

25 perceived vapours rolling between us ; in a moment, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-?: ATER 143 

all had vanished ; thick darkness came on ; and, in 
the twinkling of an eye, I was far away from monn- 
tains, and by lamp-light in Oxford-street, walking 
again with Ann — just as we walked seventeen years 
before, when we were both children. 5 

As a °final specimen, I cite one of a different char- 
acter, from 1820. 

The dream commenced with a music which now I 
often heard in dreams — a music of preparation and 
of awakening suspense ; a music like the opening of lo 
the "Coronation Anthem, and which, like that, gave 
the feeling of a vast march — of infinite cavalcades 
filing off — and the tread of innumerable armies. The 
morning was come of a mighty day — a day of crisis 
and of final hope for human nature, then suffering 15 
some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread 
extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where — some- 
how, I knew not how — by some beings, I knew not 
whom — a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting, 
— was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music; 20 
with which my sympathy was the more insupportable 
from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its na- 
ture, and its x^ossible issue. I, as is usual in dreams, 
(where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to 
every movement), had the power, and yet had not 25 



144 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could 
raise myself, to will it ; and yet again had not the 
power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon 
nie, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. ° '' Deeper 
5 than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, 
like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater in- 
terest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever 
yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. 
Then came sudden alarms: hurryings to and fro: trepi- 

10 dations of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether 
from the good cause or the bad : darkness and lights : 
tempest and human faces ; and at last, with the sense 
that all was lost, female forms, and the features that 
were worth all the world to me, and but a moment al- 

15 lowed, — and clasped hands, and heart-breaking part- 
ings, and then — everlasting farewells ! °and with a 
sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the in- 
cestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, 
the sound was reverberated — everlasting farewells ! 

20 and again, and yet again reverberated — everlasting 
farewells ! 

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud — °"I 
will sleep no more." 

But I am now called upon to Avind up a narrative 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 145 

which has already extended to an unreasonable length. 
Within more spacious limits, the materials which I 
have used might have been better unfolded ; and much 
which I have not used might have been added with 
effect. Perhaps, however, enough has been given. It -5 
now remains that I should say something of the way 
in which this conflict of horrors was finally brought 
to a crisis. The reader is already aware (from a pas- 
sage near the beginning of the introduction to the first 
part) that the opium-eater has, in some way or other, lo 
"unwound, almost to its final links, the accursed chain 
wdiich bound him." By what means ? To have nar- 
rated this, according to the original intention, would 
have far exceeded the space Avhich can now be allowed. 
It is fortunate, as such a cogent reason exists for 15 
abridging it, that I should, on a maturer view of the 
case, have been exceedingly unwilling to injure, by 
any such unaffecting details, the impression of the 
history itself, as an appeal to the prudence and the 
conscience of the yet unconfirmed opium-eater — or 20 
even f though a very inferior consideration) to injure 
its effect as a composition. The interest of the judi- 
cious reader will not attach itself chiefly to the subject 
of the fascinating spells, but to the fascinating power. 
Not the opium-eater, but the opium, is the true hero 25 



146 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

of the tale, and the legitimate centre on which the 
interest revolves. The object was to display the mar- 
vellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for 
pain : if that is done, the action of the piece has closed. 
However, as some people, in spite of all laws to the 
contrary, will persist in asking what became of the 
opium-eater, and in what state he now is, I answer for 
him thus : The reader is aware that opium had long 
ceased to found its empire on spells of pleasure; it 
was solely by the tortures connected with the attempt 
to abjure it that it kept its hold. Yet, as other tor- 
tures, no less it may be thought, attended the non- 
abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only of evils was 
left ; and that might as well have been adopted, which, 
however terrific in itself, held out a prospect of final 
restoration to happiness. This appears true; but good 
logic gave the author no strength to act upon it. How- 
ever, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a crisis 
for other objects still dearer to him — and which will 
always be far dearer to him than his life, even now 
that it is again a happy one. :— I saw that I must die 
if I continued the opium : I determined, therefore, if 
that should be required, to die in throwing it off. 
How much I was at that time taking I cannot say ; 
for the opium which I used had been purchased for 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 147 

me by a friend who afterwards refused to let me pay 
him ; so that I could not ascertain even what quantity 
I had used within the year. I apprehend, however, 
that I took it very irregularly : and that I varied from 
about fifty or sixty grains to 150 a-day. My first task 
was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and, as fast as I 
could, to twelve grains. 

I triumphed : but think not, reader, that therefore 
my sufferings were ended, nor think of me as of one 
sitting in a dejected state. Think of me as one, even 
when four months had passed, still agitated, Avrithing, 
throbbing, palpitating, shattered ; and much, perhaps, 
in the situation of him who has been racked, as I col- 
lect the torments of that state from the affecting 
account of them left by °a most innocent sufferer (of 
the times of James I.). Meantime,,! derived no bene- 
fit from any medicine, except one prescribed to me by 
an Edinburgh surgeon of great eminence, viz. ammoni- 
ated tincture of Valerian. Medical account, therefore, 
of my emancipation I have not much to give : and 
even that little, as managed by a man so ignorant of 
medicine as myself, would probably tend only to mis- 
lead. At all events, it would be misplaced in this 
situation. The moral of the narrative is addressed to 
the opium-eater ; and therefore, of necessity, limited 



148 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

in its application. If he is taught to fear and tremble, 
enough has been effected. But he may say, that the 
issue of my case is at least a proof that opium, after 
a seventeen years' use and an eight years' abuse of 
its powers, may still be renounced: and that he may 
chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, 
or that with a stronger constitution than mine he may 
obtain the same results with less. This may be true : 
I would not presume to measure the efforts of other 
men by my own : I heartily wish him more energy : I 
wish him the same success. Nevertheless, I had mo- 
tives external to myself which he may unfortunately 
want : and these supplied me with conscientious sup- 
ports which mere personal interests might fail to sup- 
ply to a mind debilitated by opium. 

°Lord Bacon conjectures that it may be as painful 
to be born as to die : I think it probable : and, during 
the whole period of diminishing the opium, I had 
the torments of a man passing out of one mode of 
existence into another. The issue was not death, but 
a sort of physical regeneration : and I may add, that 
ever since, at intervals, I have had a restoration of 
more than youthful spirits, though under the pressure 
of difficulties, which, in a less happy state of mind, I 
should have called misfortunes. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 149 

One memorial of my former condition still remains : 
my dreams are not yet perfectly calm : the dread swell 
and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided : 
the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, 
but not all departed : my sleep is still tumultuous, 
and, like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when 
looking back from afar, it is still (in the tremendous 
line of Milton) — 

°With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms. 



CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH 
OPIUM-EATER 

APPENDIX 

°The interest excited by the two papers bearing this 
title, in our Numbers for September and October, 1821, 
will have kept our promise of a Third Part fresh in 
the remembrance of our Keaders. That we are still 
unable to fulfil our engagement in its original mean- 
ing, will, we are sure, be matter of regret to them, as 
to ourselves, especially when they have perused the 
following affecting narrative. It was composed for 
the purpose of being appended to an Edition of the 
Confessions, in a separate Volume, which is already 
before the public; and we have reprinted it entire, 
that our Subscribers may be in possession of the whole 
of this extraordinary history. 



The proprietors of this little work having deter- 
mined on reprinting it, some explanation seems called 15 
for, to account for the non-appearance of a third part 

151 



152 APPENDIX 

promised in the London Magazine of December last ; 
and the more so because the Proprietors, under whose 
guarantee that promise was issued, might otherwise be 
implicated in the blame — little or much — attached 

5 to its non-fulhlment. This blame, in mere justice, 
the author takes wholly upon himself. What may be 
the exact amount of the guilt which he thus appropri- 
ates, is a very dark question to his own judgment, 
and not much illuminated by any of the masters in 

lo casuistry whom he has consulted on the occasion. On 
the one hand, it seems generally agreed that a prom- 
ise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to 
whom it is made : for which reason it is that we see 
many persons break promises without scruple that 

15 are made to a whole nation, who keep their faith 
religiously in all private engagements, — breaches of 
promise towards the stronger party being committed 
at a man's own peril : on the other hand, the only 
parties interested in the promises of an author are his 

20 readers ; and these it is a point of modesty in any 
author to believe as few as possible; or perhaps only 
one, in which case any promise imposes a sanctity of 
moral obligation which it is shocking to think of. 
Casuistry dismissed, however, — the author throws 

25 himself on the indidgent consideration of all who may 



APPENDIX 153 

conceive themselves aggrieved by his delay — in the 
following account of his own condition from the end 
of last year, when the engagement was made, up nearly 
to the present time. For any purpose of self-excuse, 
it might be sufficient to say that intolerable bodily 
suffering had totally disabled him for almost any 
exertion of mind, more especially for such as demands 
and presupposes a pleasurable and genial state of 
feeling: but, as a case that may by possibility con- 
tribute a trifle to the medical history of Opium, in a 
further stage of its action than can often have been 
brought under the notice of professional men, he has 
judged that it might be acceptable to some readers to 
have it described more at length. °Fiat experimentnm 
in corpore vili is a just rule where there is any reason- 
able presumption of benefit to arise on a large scale ; 
what the benefit may be will admit of a doubt : but 
there can be none as to the value of the body ; for a 
more worthless body than his own, the author is free 
to confess, cannot be. It is his pride to believe that 
it is the very ideal of a base, crazy, despicable ' human 
system — that hardly ever could have been meant to 
be sea-worthy for two days under the ordinary storms 
and wear-and-tear of life: and indeed, if that were 
the creditable way of disposing of human bodies, he 



154 APPENDIX 

must own that he should almost be ashamed to be- 
queath his wretched structure to any respectable dog. 
— But now to the case; which, for the sake of avoid- 
ing the constant recurrence of a cumbersome periph- 
rasis, the author will take the liberty of giving in the 
first person. 

Those who have read the Confessions will have 
closed them with the impression that I had wholly 
renounced the use of Opium. This impression I meant 
to convey : and that for two reasons : first, because 
the very act of deliberately recording such a state of 
suffering necessarily presumes in the recorder a power 
of surveying his own case as a cool spectator, and a 
degree of spirits for adequately describing it, which 
it would be inconsistent to suppose in any person 
speaking from the station of an actual sufferer: 
secondly, because I, who had descended from so large 
a quantity as 8,000 drops to so small a one (compara- 
tively speaking) as a quantity ranging between 300 
and 160 drops, might well suppose that the victory 
was in effect achieved. In suffering ray readers, 
therefore, to think of me as of a reformed opium- 
eater, I left no impression but what I shared my- 
self; and, as may be seen, even this impression was 



APPENDIX 155 

left to be collected from the general tone of the con- 
chision, and not from any specific words — which 
are in no instance at variance with the literal truth. 
— In no long time after that paper was written, I 
became sensible that the effort which remained would 5 
cost me far more energy than I had anticipated : and 
the necessity for making it was more apparent every 
month. In particular I became aware of an increas- 
ing callousness or defect of sensibility in the stomach ; 
and this I imagined might imply a scirrhous state of lo 
that organ either formed or forming. An eminent 
physician, to whose kindness I was at that time 
deeply indebted, informed me that such a termination 
of my case was not impossible, though likely to be 
forestalled by a different termination, in the event of 15 
my continuing the use of opium. Opium therefore I 
resolved wholly to abjure, as soon as I should find 
myself at liberty to bend my undivided attention and 
energy to this purpose. It was not however until the 
24th of June last that any tolerable concurrence of 20 
facilities for such an attempt arrived. On that day I 
began my experiment, having previously settled in my 
own mind that I would not flinch, but would " stand 
up to the scratch" — under any possible "punish- 
ment." I must premise that about 170 or 180 drops 25 



156 APPENDIX 

had been my ordinary allowance for many months : 
occasionally I had run up as high as 500; and once 
nearly to 700 : in repeated preludes to my final experi- 
ment I had also gone as low as 100 drops; but had 
5 found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day 

— which, by the way, I have always found more 
difficult to get over than any of the preceding three. 
I went off under easy sail — 130 drops a day for three 
days : on the fourth I plunged at once to 80 : the 

lo misery which I now suffered "took the conceit" out 
of me at once : and for about a month I continued off 
and on about this mark : then I sunk to 60 : and the 
next day to — none at all. This was the first day for 
nearly ten years that I had existed without opium. 

15 I persevered in my abstinence for 90 hours; i.e. 
upwards of half a week. Then I took — ask me not 
how much : say, ye severest, wdiat would ye have 
done ? Then I abstained again : then took about 25 
drops : then abstained : and so on. 

JO Meantime the symptoms which attended my case 
for the first six weeks of the experiment were these : 

— enormous irritability and excitement of the whole 
system: the stomach in particular restored to a full 
feeling of vitality and sensibility ; but often in great 

23 pain : unceasing restlessness night and day : sleep — 



APPENDIX 157 

I scarcely knew what it was : three hours out of the 
twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so agi- 
tated and shallow that I heard every sound that was 
near me : lower jaw constantly swelling: mouth ulcer- 
ated : and many other distressing symptoms that would 
be tedious to repeat; amongst which however I must 
mention one, because it had never failed to accompany 
any attempt to renounce opium — viz. violent sternu- 
tation. This now became exceedingly troublesome: 
sometimes lasting for two hours at once, and recurring 
at least twice or three times a day. I was not much 
surprised at this, on recollecting what I had some- 
where heard or read, that the membrane which lines 
the nostrils is a prolongation of that which lines the 
stomach ; whence, I believe, are explained the inflam- 
matory appearances about the nostrils of dram drink- 
ers. The sudden restoration of its original sensibility 
to the stomach expressed itself, I suppose, in this 
way. It is remarkable also that, during the whole 
period of years through which I had taken opium, 
I had never once caught cold (as the phrase is), nor 
even the slightest cough. But now a violent cold 
attacked me, and a cough soon after. In an unfin- 
ished fragment of a letter begun about this time to 
1 find these words : " You ask me to write the 



158 APPENDIX 

. Do you know °Beaiimont and Fletcher's 

play of Thierry and Theodoret ? There you will see my 
case as to sleep : nor is it much of an exaggeration 
in other features. — I protest to you that I have a 
5 greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present than 
in a whole year under the reign of opium. It seems 
as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up 
for a decad of years by opium, had now, according to 
the °old fable, been thawed at once — such a multitude 

lo stream in upon me from all, quarters. Yet such is my 
impatience and hideous irritability — that, for one 
which I detain and write down, fifty escape me : in spite 
of my weariness from suffering and want of sleep, I 
cannot stand still or sit for two minutes together. 

15 ° ' I nunc, et versus tecum meditare canoros.'" 

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a neigh- 
bouring surgeon, requesting that he would come over 
to see me. In the evening he came : and after briefly 
stating the case to him, I asked this question : — 

20 Whether he did not think that the opium might have 
acted as a stimulus to the digestive organs ; and that 
the present state of suffering in the stomach, which 
manifestly was the cause of the inability to sleep, 
might arise from indigestion ? His answer was — 

25 No: on the contrary he thought that the suffering 



APPENDIX 159 

was caused by digestion itself — which should natu- 
rally go on below the consciousness, but which from 
the unnatural state of the stomach, vitiated by so 
long a use of opium, was become distinctly percep- 
tible. This opinion was plausible : and the uninter- 
mitting nature of the suffering disposes me to think 
that it was true : for, if it had been any mere irregular 
affection of the stomach, it should naturally have in- 
termitted occasionally, and constantly fluctuated as 
to degree. The intention of nature, as manifested in 
the healthy state, obviously is — to withdraw from 
our notice all the vital motions, such as the circula- 
tion of the blood, the expansion and contraction of 
the lungs, the peristaltic action of the stomach, &c. ; 
and opium, it seems, is able in this, as in other in- 
stances, to counteract her purposes. — By the advice 
of the surgeon I tried hitters : for a short time these 
greatly mitigated the feelings under which I laboured: 
but about the forty-second day of the experiment the 
symptoms already noticed began to retire, and new 
ones to arise of a different and far more tormenting 
class : under these, but with a few intervals of remis- 
sion, I have since continued to suffer. But I dismiss 
them undescribed for two reasons : 1st, because the 
mind revolts from retracing circumstantially any suf- 



160 APPENDIX 

ferings from which it is removed by too short or by 
no interval: to do this with minuteness enough to 
make the review of any use — would be indeed °"infan- 
clum renovare dolorem,'^ and possibly without a suffi- 
5 cient motive: for 2dly, I doubt whether this latter 
state be anyway referable to opium — positively con- 
sidered, or even negatively ; that is, whether it is to 
be numbered amongst the last evils from the direct 
action of opium, or even amongst the earliest evils 

lo consequent upon a tvant of opium in a system long 
deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the symp- 
toms might be accounted for from the time of year 
(August) : for, though the summer was not a hot one, 
yet in any case the sum of all the heat funded (if one 

15 may say so) during the previous months, added to the 
existing heat of that month, naturally renders August 
in its better half the hottest part of the year : and it 
so happened that the excessive perspiration, which 
even at Christmas attends any great reduction in the 

20 daily quantum of opium — and which in. July was so 
violent as to oblige me to use a bath five or six times 
a day, had about the setting in of the hottest season 
wholly retired: on which account any bad effect of 
the heat might be the more unmitigated. Another 

25 symptom, viz^ what in my ignorance I call internal 



APPENDIX 161 

rlieiimatism (sometimes affecting the shoulders, &c., 
but more often appearing to be seated in the stomach), 
seemed again less probably attributable to the opium or 
the want of opium than to the dampness of the house 
which I inhabit, which had about that time attained 5 
its maximum — July having been, as usual, a month 
of incessant rain in our most rainy part of England. 

Under these reasons for doubting whether opium 
had any connexion with the latter stage of my bodily 
wretchedness — (except indeed as an occasional cause, 10 
as having left the body weaker and more crazy, and 
thus predisposed to any mal-influence whatever), — 
I willingly spare my reader all description of it : let 
it perish to him : and would that I could as easily 
say, let it perish to my own remembrances : that any 15 
future hours of tranquillity may not be disturbed by 
too vivid an ideal of possible human misery ! 

So much for the sequel of my experiuient: as to 
the former stage, in which properly lies the experi- 
ment and its application to other cases, I must request 20 
my reader not to forget the reasons for which I have 
recorded it : these were two : 1st, a belief that I 
might add some trifle to the history of opium as a 
medical agent : in this I am aware that I have not at 
all fulfilled my own intentions, in consequence of the 25 



162 APPENDIX 

torpor of mind — pain of body — and extreme disgust 
to the subject which besieged me whilst writing that 
part of my paper; which part, being immediately sent 
off to the press (distant about five degrees of latitude), 
cannot be corrected or improved. But from this ac- 
count, rambling as it may be, it is evident that thus 
much of benefit may arise to the persons most inter- 
ested in such a history of opium — viz. to Opium-eaters 
in general — that it establishes, for their consolation 
and encouragement, the fact that opium may be re- 
nounced ; and without greater sufferings than an ordi- 
nary resolution may support ; and by a °pretty rapid 
course of descent. 

To communicate this result of my experiment — 
was my foremost purpose. 2dly, as a purpose collat- 
eral to this, I wished to explain how it had become 
impossible for me to compose a Third Part in time 
to accompany this republication : for during the very 
time of this experiment, the proof-sheets of this re- 
print were sent to me from London : and such was 
my inability to expand or, to improve them, that I 
could not even bear to read them over with attention 
enough to notice the press errors, or to correct any 
verbal inaccuracies. These were my reasons for troub- 
ling my reader with any record, long or short, of 



APPENDIX 163 

experiments relating to so truly base a subject as my 
own body : and I am earnest with the reader, that he 
will not forget them, or so far misapprehend me as to 
believe it possible that I would condescend to °so ras- 
cally a subject for its own sake, or indeed for any less 5 
object than that of general benefit to others. Such an 
animal as the self-observing valetudinarian — I know 
there is: T have met him myself occasionally : and I 
know that he is the worst imaginable °lieautontimorou- 
meiios; aggravating and sustaining, by calling into 10 
distinct consciousness, every symptom that would else 
perhaps — under a different direction given to the 
thoughts — become evanescent. But as to myself, so 
profound is my contempt for this undignified and self- 
ish habit, that I could as little condescend to it as I 15 
could to spend my time in watching a poor servant 
girl — to whom at this moment I hear some lad or 
other making love at the back of my house. Is it for 
a Transcendental Philosopher to feel any curiosity on 
such an occasion ? Or can I, whose life is worth only 20 
eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to have 
leisure for such trivial employments ? — However, to 
put this out of question, I shall say one thing, which 
will perhaps shock some readers : but I am sure it 
ought not to do so, considering the motives on which 25 



1G4: APPENDIX 

I say it. No man, I suppose, employs mucli of his 
time on the phenomena of his own body without some 
regard for it; whereas the reader sees that, so far from 
looking upon mine with any complacency or regard, I 

5 hate it and make it the object of my bitter ridicule 
and contempt : and I should not be displeased to know 
that the last indignities which the law inflicts upon 
the bodies of the worst malefactors might hereafter 
fall upon it. And, in testification of my sincerity in 

lo saying this, I shall make the following offer. Like 
other men, I have particular fancies about the place 
of my burial : having lived chiefly in a mountainous 
region, I rather cleave to the conceit, that a grave in 
a green churchyard, amongst the ancient and solitary 

15 hills, will be a sublimer and more tranquil place of 
repose for a philosopher than any in the hideous °G-ol- 
gothas of London. Yet if the gentlemen of Surgeons' 
Hall think that any benefit can redound to their sci- 
ence from inspecting the appearances in the body of 

20 an Opium-eater, let them speak but a word, and I will 
take care that mine shall be legally secured to them 
— i.e. as soon as I have done with it myself. Let them 
not hesitate to express their wishes upon any scruples 
of false delicacy, and consideration for my feelings : 

25 I assure them they will do me too much honour by 



APPENDIX 165 

' demonstrating ' on such a crazy body as mine : and 
it will give me pleasure to anticipate this posthumous 
revenge and insult inflicted upon that which has caused 
me so much suffering in this life. Such bequests are 
not common: reversionary benefits contingent upon 5 
the death of the testator are indeed dangerous to an- 
nounce in many cases : of this we have a remarkable 
instance in the habits of a °Koman prince — who used, 
upon any notification made to him by rich persons, 
that they had left him a handsome estate in their ic 
wills, to express his entire satisfaction at such arrange- 
ments, and his gracious acceptance of those loyal leg- 
acies : but then, if the testators neglected to give him 
immediate possession of the property, if they traitor- 
ously " persisted in living " {si vivere j^erseverarent, as 15 
°Suetonius expresses it), he was highly provoked, and 
took his measures accordingly. In those times, and 
from one of the worst of the Caesars, we might expect 
such conduct : but I am sure that from English sur- 
geons at this day I need look for no expressions of 2c 
impatience, or of any other feelings, but such as are 
answerable to that pure love of science and all its 
interests, which induces me to make such an offer. 

Sept. 30, 1822. 



NOTES 



Page 1, line 13. decent drapery. " All the decent drapery 
of life is to be rudely torn off." — Burke, Beflections on the 
Eevolution in France. 

Page 2, line 8. French literature. He here refers to Les 
Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Les Con- 
fessions was published posthumously, 1782. 

1. 8. that part of the German. He refers to such books as 
Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1774. 

Page 3, line 1. humbly to express. 

" It was a solitary mound ; 
Which two spears' length of level ground 
Did from all other graves divide : 
As if in some respect of pride ; 
Or melancholy's sickly mood, 
Still shy of human neighbourhood ; 
Or guilt, that humbly would express 
A penitential loneliness." 
— Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone, Canto I. 

Page 4, line 3. not yet recorded. " ' Not yet recorded,^ I 
say : for there is one celebrated man [Coleridge] of the present 
day, who, if all be true which is reported of him, has greatly 
exceeded me in quantity." — De Quincey''s Note. 

167 



168 NOTES , [Page 5 

Page 5, line 3. William Wilberforce (1759-1833) , the famous 
philanthropist, advocate of Catholic Emancipation, and of the 
abolition of the Slave Trade. The original text has a comma 
after Wilberforce. 

1. 4. the late Dean of Carlisle. Dr. Isaac Milner (1750- 
1820). He v^^as an intimate friend of Wilberforce. Elected 
president of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1788. Presented to 
the deanery of Carlisle, 1791. 

1. 4. Lord Erskine. Thomas Erskine (1750-1823) , the noted 
orator and lavi^yer. 

1. 5. Mr. , the philosopher. " Who is Mr. Dash, the 

philosopher ? Really I have forgot. Not through any fault of 
my own, but on the motion of some absurd coward having a 
voice potential at. the press, all the names [in this sentence] 
were struck out behind my back in the first edition of the book, 
thirty -five years ago. I was not consulted, and did not discover 
the absurd blanks until some months afterwards, when I was 
taunted with them very reasonably by a caustic reviewer. Noth- 
ing could have a more ludicrous effect than this appeal to 
shadows — to my Lord Dash, to Dean Dash, and to Mr. Secre- 
tary Dash. Very naturally it thus happened to Mr. Philosopher 
Dash that his burning light, alas ! was extinguished irrecover- 
ably in the general melee. Meantime, there was no excuse what- 
ever for this absurd interference, such as might have been alleged 
in any personality capable of causing pain to any one person 
concerned. All the cases, except, perhaps, that of Wilberforce 
(about which I have at this moment some slight lingering doubts) , 
were matters of notoriety to large circles of friends. It Is due to 



Page 8] NOTES 169 

Mr. John Taylor, the accomplished publisher of the work, that 
I should acquit him ol any share in this absurdity." — De 
Quincey''s Note (ed. 1856). 

1. 5. a late Under-Secretary of State. Mr. Addington, 
brother of Henry Addington first Lord Sidmouth (who suc- 
ceeded Pitt as Prime Minister in 1800). 

1.10. Mr. Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), 
poet and critic ; best known by his Ancient 3Iariner and Kubla 
Khan, poems closely related to the " visions " of the Confessions. 

Page 6, line 20. That those eat now, etc. An adaptation of 
the refrain in the Pervigilium Veneris, an anonymous Latin 
poem of the second or third century a.d.; — 

"Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet," 
which Parnell (1679-1718) thus paraphrases : — 

" Let those love now, who never lov'd before, 
Let those who always lov'd, now love the more." 
1. 24. Awsiter. John Awsiter, M.D. Died 1768. 

Page 7, line 3. Mead. Richard Mead (1673-1754) , Physician 
to George II. 

1. 6. ^tavavra (twctoio-i. From Pindar (b.c. 522-443), 
Olympian Odes, 2, 1. 152, meaning, "a word to the wise," or 
" a word to those in the secret." This line is the legend of 
Gray's TJie Progress of Poesy. 

Page 8, line 21. whose talk is of oxen. " How can he get 
wisdom that holdeth the plow, and that glorieth in the goad, that 
driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk 
is of bullocks? " — JEcclesiasticus xxxviii. 25. 



170 NOTES [Page 9 

Page 9, line 5. Humani nihil a se alienum putat. An adap- 
tation of the famous line in Terence's (about b.c. 195-159) play, 
Heautontimorumenos : " Homo sum : humani nihil a me alienum 
puto." 

1. 14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. See note to p. 5, 1. 10. 

1.16. David Ricardo (1772-1828). His most important book, 
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), laid 
the foundations of the "classical" political economy more 
securely than even Adam Smith. "A third exception might 
perhaps have been added : and my reason for not adding that 
exception is chiefly because it was only in his juvenile efforts that 
the w^riter w^hom I allude to, expressly addressed himself to philo- 
sophical themes ; his riper povt^ers having been all dedicated (on 
very excusable and very intelligible grounds, under the present 
direction of the popular mind in England) to criticism and the 
Fine Arts. Apart, however, I doubt whether he is not rather to 
be considered an acute thinker than a subtle one. It is, besides, 
it great drawback on his mastery over philosophical subjects that 
he has obviously not had the advantage of a regular scholastic 
education : he has not read Plato in his youth (which most likely 
was only his misfortune), but neither has he read Kant in his 
manhood (which is his fault)." — De Quincey''s Note. The 
"third exception '' is probably William Hazlitt (1778-1830), 
according to Garnett. 

1. 18. inner eye. Compare Wordsworth, The Daffodils, 
"inward eye." 

1. 24. Scottish professors. " I disclaim any allusion to exist- 
ing professors, of whom indeed 1 know only one." — De Quin- 



Page 13] NOTES 171 

cey's Note. He refers to John Wilson, commonly known as 
Christopher North (1785-1854), Professor of Moral Philosophy 
in the University of Edinburgh, and author of Nodes Amhrosi- 
ance^ a series of papers which appeared in BlackwoocVs Maga- 
zine from 1822 to 1833. He was one of DeQuincey's most 
intimate friends. 

Page 10, line 19. a most painful affection of the stomach. 

"I have, I believe, now fully established my proposition that 
gastrodynia in its aggravated form is a terrible and distressing 
disease ; and, in an aggravated form, I believe that Thomas De 
Quincey suffered from it." — From Appendix I. of Japp, Thomas 
De Quincey : His Life and Writings. {A Medical Vieiv of De 
Quincey'' s Case, by Surgeon-Major W. C; B, Eatwell, M.D.) 

Page 12, line 6. He who . . . scholar. Mr. Morgan, of Bath 
Grammar School, where De Quincey was from 1796 to 1798. 

1. 7. a ripe and a good one. 

" He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one." 

— Henry F///., IV., ii., 51. 
Spoken of Cardinal Wolsey, by Griffith. 

1. 11. blockhead. Eev. Edward Spencer, rector of Wink- 
field, to whose private school De Quincey was transferred from 
Bath School, in 1799, after a short trial of home tuition. 

1. 13. respectable scholar. Mr. Lawson, head of the Man- 
chester Grammar School, where De Quincey was sent, in 1800, 
very much against his will, and from which he ran away (as he 
tells us in the Confessions) in July, 1802. 

Page 13, line 5. sacrifice to the graces. ' ' The Graces are the 



172 NOTES [Page 13 

goddesses of grace, and of everything which lends charm and 
beauty to nature and human life. Their names are Euphrosyn^ 
(Joy), Thalia (Bloom), and Aglia (Brilliance)." — HarjMfs 
Classical Dictionary. Hence the phrase means "to write 
poetry." 

1. 6. Sophocles. Born about b.c. 495, in the deme of 
Colonus, near Athens. He brought Greek tragedy to its per- 
fection. He died b.c. 405. 

1. 8. Archididasculus. A humorous use of the Greek word 
for " head-master." 

1. 15. epigrams. The Greek epigram was simply a short 
poem written in the elegiac couplet. The epigram with a point 
was a Roman invention. It is probable that De Quincey uses it 
in this latter sense, thus defined by Scaliger : — 

*' The qualities rare in a bee that we meet, 
In an epigram never should fail : 
The body should always be little and sweet, 
And a sting should be left in its tail." 

Page 14, line 14. a woman of high rank. ' ' For the last three 
years, in particular, Lady Carbery, a young woman some ten 
years older than myself, and who was as remarkable for her 
intellectual pretensions as she was for her beauty and benevo- 
lence, had maintained a correspondence with me upon questions 
of literature." — Confessions (ed. 1856), Works, III., p. 280. 
Her maiden name was Watson, and she had taken a warm in- 
terest in De Quincey from his childhood. 

Page 15, line 7. a just remark of Dr. Johnson's. In his last 
essay in The Idler (No. 103, Saturday, April 5, 1760) entitled 



Page 18] NOTES 173 

The Horrour of the Last: "There are few things not purely- 
evil, of whicli we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, 
this is the last.''' Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), is perhaps the 
greatest man of letters in English literature, and is the subject 
of the greatest biography in English — Boswell's Life of John- 
son. 

Page 16, line 15. drest in earliest light. The editor has not 
been able to find the source of this quotation. 

Page 17, line 11, pensive citadel. 

" Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; 
And hermits are contented with their cells ; 
And students with their pensive citadels. . . ." 

— Wordsworth, Nuns Fret Not. 

1. 17. dedicated to intellectual pursuits. Compare Words- 
worth's statement that he felt himself " a dedicated Spirit." — 
The Prelude, Bk. IV. 

Page 18, line 2. the lovely . " The housekeeper was in 

the habit of telling me that the lady had lived (meaning, perhaps, 
had been born) two centuries ago ; that date would better agree 
with the tradition that the portrait was a copy from Vandyke. 
All that she knew further about the lady was that either to the 
Grammar school, or to that particular college at Oxford with 
which the school was connected, or else to that particular col- 
lege at Oxford with which Mr. Lawson personally was con- 
nected, or else, fourthly, to Mr. Lawson himself as a private 
individual, the unknown lady had been a special benefactress. 
She was also a special benefactress to me through eighteen 
months by means of her sweet Madonna countenance. And 



174 NOTES [Page 18 

in some degree it serves to spiritualize and to hallow this ser- 
vice that of her v^ho imconsciousl}^ rendered it I knew neither 
the name, nor the exact rank or age, nor the place where she 
lived and died. She was parted from me by perhaps two cen- 
turies ; I from her by the gulf of eternity." — De Quincey's 
Note (ed. 1856). 

1. 12. So blended and intertwisted . . . tears. Compare 
Shelley, To a Skylark, st. 18 : — 
" Our siucerest laughter 
With some pain is fraught; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 

Page 19, lines 7-8. of Atlantean shoulders. Adapted from 
Milton's description of Beelzebub : — 

"... Sage he stood 
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies." 

— Paradise Lost, I., 304-307. 
1. 9. Salisbury plain. An undulating plateau, near Salis- 
bury, in Wilts, in the midst of which Stonehenge is situated. 
Formerly a sterile tract, it has been converted into a fertile 
district by the advance of agriculture. 

Page 20, line 4. contretems. The standard spelling is "con- 
tretemps." French for "mishap." 

1. 6. the Seven Sleepers. "Seven Christians of Ephesus 
who, according to the story of Gregory of Tours fled to a cave 
at the time of the persecution under the emperor Decius in the 
third century, and there fell into a sleep that lasted for nearly 
two hundred years. Returning to the city, they experienced 



Page 22] NOTES 175 

the surprise that Rip Van Winkle felt on his famous return, 
and at last discovered the truth regarding their sleep. Having 
had an interviev^ with the emperor, and convinced him of the 
life beyond the grave, they sank into a second sleep that is to 
last until the Resurrection." — Harper'' s Classical Dictionary. 

1. 10. §tourderie. French for "blunder." In the edition 
of 1856 "comic wilfulness" is substituted. 

1. 24. with Providence my guide. Adapted from Milton : — 

" The world was all before them, where to choose 
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide." 

— Paradise Lost, XII., 646-647. 

Page 21, line 2, a favourite English poet. Doubtless a 
volume of Wordsworth's early poems. 

1. 4. Euripides. Born b. c. 480, in Salamis. The last of 
the three great Greek dramatists — ^schylus, Sophocles, and 
Euripides. He died b.c. 406. He seems to have been a favor- 
ite writer of De Quincey's. 

1.7. other personal accounts. "Amongst the attractions 
that drew me so strongly to the Lakes, there had also by that 
time arisen in this lovely region the deep, deep magnet (as to 
me only in all this world it then was) of William Wordsworth." 
— Edition of 1856, Works, III., p. 283. 

1. 7. Accident, however, gave a different direction. The 
"accident" is explained at very great length in the edition of 
1856. 

Page 22, line 7. Not to know them, etc. Adapted from 
Milton: "Not to know me argues yourselves unknown." — 
Paradise Lost, IV., 830. 



176 NOTES [Page 22 

1.24. noli me tangere. " Touch me not." 

Page 23, line 1. ol iroXXoi, the common people, the com- 
monalty. 

Page 27, line 6. Westmoreland. In this case the spelling of 
the original text is Westmorland. 

Page 29, line 12. Greek Sapphics or Alcaics. Sappho and 
Alcseus were contemporaries, toward the end of the seventh 
century b.c. They lived in Lesbos, and were the two great 
leaders of the ^oiian school of Greek lyric poetry. The fol- 
lowing stanza from A. C. Swinburne's Sapphics., referring to 
Sappho, is in the Sapphic metre : — 

" Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! 
All the Loves wept, listening ; sick with angnish, 
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; 
Fear was upon them. ..." 

Tennyson's Hilton is an imitation of the Alcaic metre :" — 

" O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, 
O skiird to sing of Time or Eternity, 
God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages. . . ." 
1. 16. Mr. Shelley is right . . . old age. Revolt of Islam, 
IV., V. — X., where he describes the "gentle Hermit," whose 
"heart had grown old, but had corrupted not," because "all 
the ways of man among mankind he read." 

1. 21. means which I must omit for want of room. Given 
fully in the edition of 1850, Works, III., pp. 339-848. 

Page 33, line 6. the plan of Cromwell. " Cromwell . . . 
rarely lodged two nights together in one chamber, but had 



Page 37] NOTES 177 

many furnished and prepared." — Clarendon, History of the 
Behellion^ Bk. XV. — Quoted by Hunter. 

Page 34, line 9. Blue-beard room. The room in which 
Bluebeard kept the bodies of his murdered wives, and into 
which he forbade his wife to go ; hence, a forbidden room. See 
the familiar tale of Bluebeard. 

1. 12. Whether this child, etc. "Dickens must have had 
the whole situation in his mind when he drew the Marchioness 
and Sally Brass in his Old Curiosity Shop.'''' — Garnett. 

1. 19. Tartarus. " In the Iliad, Tartarus is a place beneath 
the earth, as far below Hades as Heaven is above the earth, and 
closed by iron gates. Later poets use the name as synonymous 
with Hades." — Harper's Classical Dictionary. 

Page 35, line 12. laying down. That is, "finding them 
too expensive," — De Quincey. 

1. 20. cycle and epicycle. 

"... how gird the Sphere 
With Centric and Eccentric scribbled o'er, 
Cycle and Epicycle, Orb in Orb," 

— Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII., 82-84. 

Page 36, line 6. Dr. Johnson . . . wall-fruit. Recorded in 
Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson. 

1. 12. the world was all before us. See note to p. 20, 1. 24, 

for the source of this. 

Page 37, line 3. eighteen years ago. In a Notice to the 
Header in the October, 1821, London Magazine., De Quincey has 

N 



178 NOTES [Page 37 

corrected this to nineteen^ explaining that the incidents re- 
corded, in the Preliminary Confessions lie between the early 
part of July, 1802, and the beginning of March, 1803. 

Page 38, line 2. Sine Cerere, etc. " Sine Cerere et Libero 
friget Venus." — Terence, Eunuchus, IV., v. 6. ''Without 
bread and wine love grows cold." 

1. 5. But the truth is, etc. In this and the following sen- 
tence De Quincey anticipates a large part of Walt Whitman's 
message. 

1. 10. more Socratico. "After the manner of Socrates, 
who never opened a school and never lectured publicly, nor 
did he receive any money for teaching, but went about in the 
most public parts of Athens, such as the market place, the 
gymnasia, and the work shops, seeking opportunity for awak- 
ing in the young and old alike moral consciousness and an 
impulse toward self-knowledge with respect to the end and 
value of human action." — Harper^ s Classical Dictionary. 

1. 16. poor limitary creature. Compare Milton, "proud 
limitary Cherub," Paradise Lost, IV., 971. 

Page 42, line 17. to chace — to haunt — to waylay. Remi- 
niscent of Wordsworth, She was a Phantom of Delight: "To 
haunt, to startle, and waylay." , 

1. 25. too deep for tears. From Wordsworth, Ode on the 
Intimations of Immortality^ last line. 

Page 43, line 14. Yet some feelings ... for ever. Com- 
pare, for a more extended expression of a similar idea, in a 



Page 51] NOTES 179 

similar rhythm, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dedication of David 
Balfour: "You are still — as when first I saw, as when last 
I addressed you — in the venerable city which I must always 
think of as my home. And I have come so far ; and the 
sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me ; and I see like 
a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and 
the whole stream of lives flowing down there, far in the 
north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in 
the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. 
And I admire and bow my head before the strange romance of 
destiny." 

Page 44, line 2. his late Majesty's. George the Third's. 

1.18. soliciting. That is, "advocating." 

Page 46, line 25. Doctor's Commons. So called because the 
Doctors of Civil Law dined here together four days in each 
term. In De Quincey's time it also included a registry of 
wills. See Dickens, David Copperfield^ for a description of 
Doctors' Commons. 

Page 47, line 2. Thomas Quincey. It was our author's 
mother who added the de to the family name. 

11. 12 and 15. materialiter . . . formaliter. That is, he humor- 
ously explains that he found himself considered as a material 
object, counterfeiting himself considered as an object of thought, 
or idea. 

Page 51, line 24. the fine fluent motion. "The Bristol 
Mail is the best appointed in the kingdom, owing to the double 
advantage of an unusually good road, and of an extra sum for 



180 NOTES [Page 51 

the expences subscribed by the Bristol merchants.'' — De Quin- 
cey^s note. For a description of the "fine fluent motion" of 
the Mail Coach, and the dreams based on it, see De Quincey's 
The English Mail Coach. 

Page 52, line 13. infinite . . . varieties. Compare Shake- 
speare's "her infinite variety," Antony and Cleopatra., II., ii., 
250. 

Page 54, line 18. prettily expressed by a Roman poet. 
" Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator." — Juvenal, Satire 
X., 22. "The traveller with emj)ty pockets vv^ill sing in the 
face of the robber." Translated by Chaucer: — 

'* The poure man, whan he goth by the weye, 
Before the theves he may synge and playe." 

— Wife of Bath's Tale, 337-338. 

Page 55, line 7. Lord of my learning, etc. Adapted from 
Shakespeare : — " Lord of thy presence and no land beside." — 
King John, I., i., 137. 

Page 56, lines 2-4. To slacken virtue, etc. Adapted from 
Milton : — 

" To slacken virtue and abate her edge 
Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise." 

— Paradise Regained, II., 455-456. 

Page 57, line 3. eight o'clook. The original text has. a 
comma after eight., evidently a misprint. 

1. 4. Pete's. Joseph Pote (I703P-I787) kept a boarding- 
house for the Etonians, and was an editor and publisher as well. 
The business was continued by his son. 



Page 58] NOTES 181 

1. 9. Ibi omnis effusus labor ! 

" Ibi omnis 
effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni 
foedera terque fragor staguis auditus Averni." 
"There all his toil was spilt, and the treaty broken with that 
merciless monarch ; and thrice a thunder pealed over the 
pools of Avernus."— Virgil, Georgics, IV., 491-493 (Mackail's 
Translation). From the affecting story of Orpheus and Euryd- 
ice, as told by Virgil. 

Page 58, line 3. himself, anonymously, an author. His 
book is entitled A Short Tour in the Midland Counties of 
England, performed in the Summer of 1772 : together unth an 
Account of a Similar Excursion undert-aken September, 1772. 
Published in 1775. "Though in the form of brief, business- 
like notes, the performance is altogether very creditable." — 
Masson. 

1. 12. her letters. Compare his general statement with 
regard to the purity of female English : " Would you desire at 
this day to read our noble language in its native beauty, pic- 
turesque from idiomatic propriety, racy in its phraseology, 
delicate yet sinewy in its composition, steal the mail-bags, and 
break open all the letters in female handwriting." — Essay on 
Style, Works, X., p. 145. 

1. 16. M. W. Montague. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 
(1689-1762). "It was her habit ... to write copiously to 
friends at home, and when a selection from these letters was 
published, in 1763, Lady Mary was recognized as having been 
the wittiest of English letter-writers." — Gosse, History of 
Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 205. 



182 NOTES [Page 59 

Page 59, line 1. good man's table. Probably an adaptation 
of '-If ever sat at any good man's feast." — Shakespeare, 
As You Like It, II., vii., 115. 

1. 8. The story about Otway. Thomas Otway (1625-1685). 
Dramatist, author of The Orphan and Venice Preserved. The 
incident referred to by De Quincey is mentioned by an early 
biographer, who says that one day Otway sallied forth from 
an obscure public-house, and begged a shilling from a gentle- 
man in a coffee-house, saying, "I am the poet, Otway." This 
person, surprised and distressed, gave him a guinea. With 
it he bought a roll of bread, and began to devour it with 
the rage of hunger; but, incapable of swallowing it from 
long abstinence, he was choked with the first mouthful. — 
RoDEN Noel. 

Page 61, line 16. Saracen's head. De Quincey has in mind 
the representations of bronzed and beturbaned Saracens' heads, 
often painted as signs over inn doors. 

Page 64, line 11. Magdalen. See St. Luke vii. 36-50. 

1. 14. the ruin they had begun. At this point the portion 
printed in the September number of the London Magazine 
ends. An editorial note says, "The remainder of this very 
interesting Article will be given in the next number." 

Page QQ, line 21. the road . . . North . . . Grasmere. 
Wordsworth was then living at Grasmere. De Quincey had 
once actually gone to Westmoreland to call on Wordsworth, 
but an overwhelming shyness and reverence caused him to turn 
back when he was at the very door. 



Pagi. (i7] NOTES 183 

1. 22. wings of a dove. " And I said, Oh that I had wings 

like a dove ! for then would I fly aw^ay, and be at rest." 

Ps. Iv. 6. 

Page 67, line 1. that very house. In 1821 De Quincey was 
living in Dove Cottage, in which Wordsworth lived in 1803. 

1.9. blessed balm. "0tXoj' virvov 6e\yr)Tpov iiTLKOvpov voa-ov/^ 
— De Quinceifs Note. In this paragraph there are many echoes 
of Euripides' Orestes. This line opens a scene closely resembling 
the one before us. (For the explanation of the situation, see 
note to p. 68, 1. 16.) 

*^ Orestes. O balmy sleep, the sick man's comforter, 
Timely and sweet thy coming was, blest power, 
That timely steeps pain in forgetfulness 
And art misfortune's kindest deity, 
How came I here ? What brought me to this place ? 
My mind, distraught, remembers not the past. 

Electra. How glad was I, dearest, to see thee sleep. 
Shall I take hold of thee, and lift thee up? 

Orestes. Yes, yes, and wipe from my unhappy mouth 
And from my eyes the clotted gouts of foam. 

Electra. Sweet is the labour. Never shall I tire 
Of rendering thee a sister's offices. 

{He is seized with another fit of madness. He recovers, 
and speaks.] 
Orestes. After the storm again behold a calm. 
Listen, why dost thou veil thy head and weep? 
I blush to make thee partner in my woes 
And trouble with my sickness thy young soul." 

— Translated by Goldivin Smith. 



184 NOTES [Page 67 

1. 18. Eumenides. The name Eumenides signifies " the well- 
meaning goddesses," and is a euphemism for the real name 
"Furies," because the Greeks dreaded to call the fearful god- 
desses by their real name. 

1. 23. Margaret. Margaret Simpson, who became his wife 
in 1816. 

Page 68, line 3. servile ministrations. "^5u dovXevfia. — 
EuRip. Orest.'" — De Quinceifs Note. Translated " sweet is the 
labour" in the quotation from the Orestes in the note to p. 67, 
1. 9. 

1. 10. sleep no more ! 

" Macbeth. Me thought I heard a voice cry, ' Sleep no more ! 
Macbeth doth murder sleep,' the innocent sleep, 
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, 
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, 
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, 
Chief nourisher in life's feast, — 

Lady Macbeth. What do you mean ? 

Macbeth. Still it cried, ' Sleep no more ! ' to all the house : 
* Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor 
Shall sleep no more ; Macbeth shall sleep no more.' " 

— Shakespeare, Macbeth, II., ii., 35-43. 

1.15. kingofmen. '•'■ ava^avdpujv AyafieiJividv.'''' — De Quincey^s 
Note. One of the many epithets Homer applies to Agamemnon. 

1. 16. hid her face in her robe. '■'■ ofxixa deiahau} irewXojv. 
The scholar will know that throughout this passage I refer to 
the early scenes of the Orestes ; one of the most beautiful exhi- 
bitions of the domestic affections which even the dramas of Eurip- 
ides can furnish. To the English reader, it may be necessary 



Page 72] NOTES 185 

to say, that the situation at the opening of the drama is that of 
a brother attended only by his sister during the demoniacal pos- 
session of a suffering conscience (or, in the mythology of the 
play, haunted by the Furies), and in circumstances of immedi- 
ate danger from enemies, and of desertion or cold regard from 
nominal friends." — De Quincei/s Note. This expression is 
translated in a quotation in the note to p. 67, 1. 9 — " Why 
dost thou veil thy head ? " 

Page 71, line 7. the stately Pantheon. 

"Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same 
In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name." 
— Wordsworth, Power of Music, 3-4. 

" The Pantheon . . . has successively been a concert-room, a 
theatre, and a bazaar, and is now the extensive wine warehouse 
of the Messrs. Gibley." — Bcedekefs London (1885). 

Page 72, line 4. evanesced. ' ' Evanesced — this way of going 
off the stage of life appears to have been well known in the 17th 
century, but at that time to have been considered a peculiar 
privilege of blood-royal, and by no means to be allowed to drug- 
gists. For about the year 1686 a poet of rather ominous name 
(and who, by the by, did ample justice to his name), viz,, Mr. 
Flat-man^ in speaking of the death of Charles II. expresses his 
surprise that any prince should commit so absurd an act as 
dying ; because, says he, ' Kings should disdain to die, and only 
disappear.'' They should abscond, that is, into the other 
world."— De Quincey's Note. Thomas Flatman (1687-1688) 
published in 1685 a Pindariqiie Ode on the Death of King 
Charles II. — Huktek. 



186 NOTES [Page 72 

1. 20. ({>apfxaKov vTrjircvGcs. 

dvTLK dp eis oivov jSdXe (pdp/xaKov, evOev einvov 
vTiirevd^s T dxo\6v re, KaKuiv iiriXridop dTrdvTiov. 

— Homer, Odyssey, IV., 220-221. 
" Presently she cast a drug into the wine whereof they drank, 
a drug to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every 
sorrow." See Milton, Comus, 675, for Nepenthes. 

Page 73, lines 7-8. I'Allegro ... II Penseroso. The com- 
panion poems of Milton, representing the moods of light cheer- 
fulness and thoughtful melancholy, respectively. 

1. 25. ex cathedra. Literally, "from the chair," i.e. "with 
authority." 

Page 74, line 17. die. " Of this, however, the learned appear 
latterly to have doubted : for in a pirated edition of Buchan's 
Domestic Medicine, which I once saw in the hands of a farmer's 
wife who was studying it for the benefit of her health, the 
Doctor was made to say — ' Be particularly careful never to take 
above five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum at once ; ' the true 
reading being probably five-and-twenty drops, which are held 
equal to about one grain of crude opium." — De Quincey''s 
Note. 

Page 75, line 3. meo periculo. " At my risk." 

Page 77, line G. ponderibus librata suis. "Poised by its 
own weight." — Ovid, Metamorphoses, I., 13. 

1. 11. Athenaeus. A Greek scholar who lived in the second 
and third centuries a. d. He wrote AeLTrvoao(f)isT at (Banquet 
of the Learned) in fifteen books. It ranges over numberless 



Pagk 78] NOTES 187 

subjects connected with domestic and social life, manners and cus- 
toms, trade, art, and science. — Harper'' s Classical Dictionary. 

Page 78, line 9. unscientific authors. " Amongst the great 
herd of travellers, &c. who show sufficiently by their stupidity 
that they never held any intercourse with opium , I must caution 
ray readers specially against the brilliant author of '■Anasta- 
sius.'' This gentleman, whose wit would lead one to presume 
him an opium-eater, has made it impossible to consider him in 
that character from the grievous misrepresentation which he 
gives of its effects, at p. 215-17, of vol, 1. — Upon consideration, 
it must appear such to the author himself : for, waiving the 
errors I have insisted on in the text, which (and others) are 
adopted in the fullest manner, he will himself admit, that an old 
gentleman 'with a snow-white beard,' who eats 'ample doses 
of opium,' and is yet able to deliver what is meant and received 
as very weighty counsel on the bad effects of that practice, is 
but an indifferent evidence that opium either kills people pre- 
maturely, or sends them into a madhouse. But, for my part, I 
see into this old gentleman and his motives : the fact is, he was 
enamoured of ' the little golden receptacle of the pernicious 
drug ' which Anastasius carried about him ; and no way of ob- 
taining it so safe and so feasible occurred, as that of frightening 
its owner out of his wits (which, by the bye, are none of the 
strongest). This commentary throws a new light upon the 
case, and greatly improves it as a story : for the old gentleman's 
speech, considered as a lecture on pharmacy, is highly absurd : 
but, considered as a hoax on Anastasius, it reads excellently." 
— De Qiiiucey''s Note. 

Anastasius : or, Memoirs of a Greek, Written at the Close 



188 NOTES [Page 78 

of the Eighteenth Century. (Published 1819.) By Thomas 
Hope (1770 ?-1831). "A marvel of erudition, eloquence, and 
profound insight into human character. . . . Lord Byron was 
singled out as the only living writer equal to the performance, 
which is said to have flattered the poet's pride. ... In lan- 
guage notable for acute characterization and bold imagery the 
author presents a faithful picture of Turkish history and civil- 
ization, interweaving its weeds and flowers, its hates and loves, 
its license and fanaticism," — Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XL., pp. 
97-99. 

"It is sufficient to say of this novel . . . that some critics, 
including Baron Bunsen, praise it as of deeper ethical import 
than any of Scott's." — Daviu Masson, British Novelists and 
their Styles (1859). 

1. 23. prima facie. " At first view or appearance." 

Page 81, line 1. With respect to the torpor, etc. But see 
Rudyard Kipling's story, llie Gate of the Hundred Soitoios, 
for a picture of the " torpor." 

1. 12. exhibition. The act of administering a remedy. 

Page 82, line 19. Grassini. Josephina Grassini (1773-1850), 
a favorite contralto in London from 1803 to 1806. 

Page 83, lines 10-11. Andromache . . . Hector. Probably 
in Cimarosa's opera, Achilles at the Siege of Troy (1798). At 
any rate she sang Cimarosa during her visits to London. 

1. 19. the fine extravaganza . . . Twelfth Night. 

" If music be the food of love, play on ; 
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting. 



Page 85] NOTES 189 

The appetite may sicken, and so die. 
That sti-ain again ! It had a dying fall : 
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, 
That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
Stealing and giving odour." — I., i., 1-7. 

1. 22. a passage in the Religio Medici. " Whosoever is 
harmonically composed delights in harmony ; which makes me 
much distrust the symmetry of those heads which disclaim 
against all Church-Musick. For myself, not only from my 
obedience, but my particular Genius, I do embrace it : for even 
that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, 
another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a pro- 
found contemplation of the First Composer. There is some- 
thing in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an 
Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and 
creatures of GOD ; such a melody to the ear, as the whole World, 
well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it 
is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in 
the ears of God." — Part II., § 9. 

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) published the Beligio 
Medici in 1642. 

For a similar interpretation of music see Plato, JRepublic, 
401 ; Browning, A Toccata of GaluppVs and Abt Vogler ; and 
Du Maurier, The Martian^ Part V. 

Pages 84-85, lines 19-2. But this is a subject . . . sub- 
limed. Compare D. G. Rossetti, The Monochord. 

Page 85, line 9. Weld the traveller. Isaac Weld, Travels 
through the United States . . . and Canada^ 1799. The passage 
is as follows : "The women, on the contrary, speak with the 



190 NOTES [Page H5 

utmost ease, and the language, as pronounced by them, appears 
as soft as Italian. They have, without exception, the most 
delicate harmonious voices I have ever heard, and the most 
pleasing gentle laugh that it is possible to conceive. I have 
oftentimes sat amongst a group of them for an hour or two 
together, merely for the pleasure of listening to their conversa- 
tion, on account of its wonderful softness and delicacy." — 
Quoted by GarneU. 

1. 23. Marinus . . . Proclus. Marinus was pupil and biog- 
rapher of Proclus. Pjroclus was born a.d. 412, at Byzantium. 
He became head of the Platonic school, and directed his efforts 
towards opposing the Platonic philosophy to the encroachments 
of Christianity. He died in 484. 

Page 86, line 3. labours that I rested from. See Revelation 
xiv. 13. 

Page 88, line 9. soot. " On enquiry I found that soot (chiefly 
from wood and peats) was useful in some stage of their wax or 
honey manufacture." — De Qidnce^fs Note. 

1.24. terrae incognitae. " Unknown lands." 

Page 90, line 2. cave of Trophonius. Trophonius was a 
famous Greek oracle. " Since those who descended into the 
cave at Labdea to consult the oracle of Trophonius were noticed 
to return dejected and melancholy, the proverb arose which was 
applied to a low-spirited person : ' He has been consulting the 
oracle of Trophonius.' " — Gayley, Classic Myths. 

1. 17. mysticism. The doctrine that man may attain truth 



Page 91] NOTES 191 

directly, by intuition. This doctrine has become familiarized 
to readers of English literature by Coleridge and Carlyle. 

1. 17. Behmenism. Jakob Boehme (Behmen is the usual 
English variant form of the name), 1575-1624. A German 
mystical writer. 

1. 18. quietism. The doctrine that the soul attains perfect 
spiritual exaltation by withdrawing from outward activities and 
engaging in mystic contemplation. 

1. 18, Sir H. Vane, the younger. Sir Henry Vane, born 
1613; opposed Laud ; emigrated to Massachusetts, of which he 
became governor in 1636 ; returned to England, and was exe- 
cuted 1662. 

Page 91, line 6. the tumult, the fever, and the strife. For 

the rhythm compare ' ' The weariness, the fever, and the fret. ' ' 
— Keats, Ode to a Nightingale^ st. 3. 

1. 8. resting from human labours. "That they may rest 
from their labours ; and their works do follow them." — Beve- 
lation xiv. 13. 

1. 16. Oh ! just . . . opium ! etc. Imitative of Sir Walter 
Raleigh's famous apostrophe to Death : " eloquent, just, and 
mighty Death ! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded ; 
what none hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world 
hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised ; 
thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the 
pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it over with 
these two narrow words, — Hie jacet / " — History of the World. 



192 NOTES [Page 91 

1. 18. pangs that tempt the spirit, etc. 

** And pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel." 
— Wordsworth, White Doe of Rylstone (Dedication). 

1. 25. Wrongs unredress'd, etc. Wordsworth, The Excur- 
sion, Bk. III. 

Page 92, line 6. Phidias. The greatest Greek sculptor (b.c. 
490-432). His great works are the Parthenon at Athens and 
the Olympian Zeus. 

1. 7. Praxiteles. Another famous Greek sculptor, born 
about B.C. 390. 

1.8. Hekat6mpylos, "le. the hundred-gated (from iKardv, 
hekaton, a hundred, and 7r6\rj, pyle, a gate). This epithet of 
hundred-gated was applied to the Egyptian Thebes in contra- 
distinction to the eTrrdirvXos (heptapylos, or seven-gated) which 
designated the Grecian Thebes, within one day's journey of 
Athens." — De Qiimcey^s Note. 

1. 8. from the anarchy of dreaming sleep. From Words- 
worth, The Excursion, Bk. IV. 

1. 11. dishonours of the grave. 1 Corinthians xv. 43 : " It is 
sown in dishonour ; it is raised in glory." — In the Lesson in the 
Order for the Burial of the Dead of the Church of England. 

Page 93, line 5, Bodleian. The famous library at Oxford, 
founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602. 

1. 21. Greek epigrams. See note to p. 13, 1. 6. 

Page 94, lines 16-17. Kant, Fichte, Schelling. Immanuel 
Kant (1724-1804), founder of the critical philosophy. Johann 



Page 99] NOTES 193 

Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Friedricli Wilhelm Joseph 
von Schelling (1775-1854) were disciples of Kant, though they 
developed his philosophy in directions little approved of by him. 

1. 21. Honi soit, etc. "Shame to him v^^ho evil thinks." 
The motto of Great Britain. 

Page 95, line 10. X. Y. Z. De Quincey's pen-name in the 
London Magazine. 

1. 11. Gustos Rotulorum. The keeper of the records of the 
sessions of a county. 

Page 96, line 5. Anastasius. See note to p. 78, 1. 9. 

1, 24. distress of mind . . . event. The death of little 
Kate Wordsworth. See Works, II., 440-445. 

Page 97, line 6. appalling irritation of the stomach. For a 

medical view of this, see note to p. 10, 1. 19. 

Page 98, line 16. ^ force d'ennuyer. "By dint of boring." 

1. 17. pandiculation. Humorous use of pedantic terms. 

Page 99, line 7. Eudaemonist. One who makes the pursuit 
of enjoyment and the production of happiness his chief aim. 

1. 14. Stoic philosophy. " A handsome news-room, of 
which I was very politely made free in passing through Man- 
chester by several gentlemen of that place, is called, I think, 
The Porch : whence I, who am a stranger in Manchester, in- 
ferred that the subscribers meant to profess themselves fol- 
lowers of Zeno. But I have been since assured that this is a 
mistake." — De Qiiincey''s Note, 
o 



194 NOTES [Page 99 

The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Citiuin, a.d. 410. 
The school was so called because Zeno held his school in the 
Stoa, or Porch. The system was ascetic, teaching perfect in- 
difference to everything external, for nothing external could be 
good or evil. 

1. 15. Eclectic. One who selects his philosophy from all 
systems. 

1. 18. sweet men, etc. 

" Ful swetely herde he confessioun, 
And plesaunt was his absolucioun." 
— Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, 221-222. 

Page 100, line 18. snow-white beard. See note to p. 78, 
1. 9. 

Page 102, line 11. wx^^K-cpov. " A day and a night." 

1. 14. That moveth altogether, etc. Wordsworth, Beso- 
lution and Independence, st. 11. The proper reading is all 
together. 

Page 103, line 20. impassable gulph fixed. See Luke xvi, 26. 

Page 105, line 12. Adelung's Mithridates. Johann Chris- 
toph Adelung (1732-180G), a German philologist, and librarian 
at Dresden, The book referred to is entitled 3IUhridates oder 
allgemeines Sprachlmnde. 

Page 107, Ihie 1. a-muck. "See the common accounts in 
any Eastern traveller or voyager of the frantic excesses com- 
mitted by Malays who have taken opium, or are reduced to 
desperation by ill luck at gambling." — De Quincey''s Note. 



Page 112J NOTES 195 

Page 108, line 16. a cottage with a double coach-house. 
" He passed a cottage with a double coach-house, 
A cottage of gentility ; 
And he owned with a grin 
That his favourite sin 
Is pride that apes humility." 

— SouTHEY, The Devil's Walk, st. 8. 

An almost identical verse (dictated by Southey) occurs in Cole- 
ridge's The DeviVs Thoughts. 

Page 109, lines 12-15. And at the doors . . . hall. Adapted 
from James Thomson (1700-1748), Castle of Indolence, st. 43, 
5-9. 

1. 24. Mr. Clarkson. Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), a 
prominent English antislavery agitator. 

Page 110, line 13. St. Thomas's day. December 21. 

1. 25. bellum internecinum. " War to the death." — Cicero 
(B.C. 106-43), Philippic Orations, 14, 3, 7. 

Page 111, line 1. Jonas Hanway (1712-1786), "tourist, 
philanthropist, and author, and said to have been ' the first 
man who ventured to walk the streets of London with an um- 
brella over his head,' was a violent opponent of tea, and got 
into conflict with Dr. Johnson on the subject." — Masson. 

1. 13. a double debt to pay. 

" The chest contrived a double debt to pay, 
A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day."- 

— Goldsmith, Deserted Village, 229-230. 

Page 112, line 3. k parte ante, from the part (of dura- 



19() NOTES [Page 112 

tion) before a given time ; a parte post, from the part (of 
duration) after a given time. Hence the two expressions mean 
eternal — vv^ithout beginning or end. 

I. 8. Aurora, the goddess of morning — Homer's "rosy-fin- 
gered Dawn." Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth. 

Page 113, line 22. the ten categories. Aristotle's ten cate- 
gories, or predicaments, viz. substance, quantity, quality, 
relation, place, time, posture, habit (or dress), action, passion. 

Page 114, line 5. But now farewell, etc. "Farewell! a 
long farewell, to all my greatness!" — Henry VIII., III., 
ii., 351. 

II. 6-7. Farewell to smiles and laughter ! 

Farewell to peace of mind ! 

Swinburne's poems. Before Dawn and The Garden of Proser- 
pine, as well as Keats's In a Drear-nighted December, are 
composed of these two rhythms. 

1. 11. Iliad of woes. Translation of a phrase in Cicero, 
Epistulcz ad Atticum, 8, 11, 3. "Malorum . . . 'IXids." 

1. 12. as when some great painter dips, etc. Percy 
Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Revolt of Islam, Canto V., 
St. 23. 

Page 117, line 16. in medias res. " Into the middle of the 
matter." From Horace (b.c. 65-8) Art of Poetry, 148. 

Page 118, line 6. John Kemble (1757-1823), one of the 
greatest Shakespearean actors. 



Page 121] NOTES 197 

1. 7. Mrs. Siddons. Sarah Siddoiis (1755-1881), one of the 
most celebrated of Shakespearean actresses. 

1. 11. overstep the modesty of nature. Shakespeare, 
Hamlet, III., ii. 

1. 13. grand lamentations of Samson Agonistes. See, for 
instance, the opening speech, 11. 1-114. 

1. 14. great harmonies of the Satanic speeches in Paradise 
Regained. See, for example, that speech beginning, " 'Tistrue, 
lam that Spirit unfortunate," Bk. II., 358-405; and also Bk. 
IV., 44-108, 195-284. 

1. 16. a young lady. Doubtless, Dorothy Wordsworth. 

Page 119, line 16. Spinosa. Baruch de Spinosa (16.32-1677), 
cue of the greatest European philosophers. 

1.18. Spanish bridge. Probably an adaptation of the famil- 
iar "castles in Spain." 

Page 121, line 7. Mr. Ricardo. See note to p. 9, 1. 16. 

1. 10. Thou art the man ! "And Nathan said to David, 
Thou art the man ! " — 2 Samuel xii. 7. 

1. 17. thinking. "The reader must remember what I here 
mean by thinJcing : because, else this would be a very presump- 
tuous expression. England, of late, has been rich to excess in 
fine thinkers, in the departments of creative and combining 
thought ; but there is a sad dearth of masculine thinkers in any 
analytic path. A Scotchman of eminent name has lately told 
us, that he is obliged to quit even mathematics, for want of 
encouragement." — De Quinceifs Note. 



198 NOTES [Page 121 

1. 19. mercantile and senatorial cares. Kicardo was a mem- 
ber of the Stock Exchange and a member of Parliament. 

1. 24. deduced a priori. That is, deduced from the laws of 
the mind. 

Page 122, line 11. the inevitable eye. Possibly a reminis- 
cence of Gray's "inevitable hour" in The Elegy ^ 1. 35. 

Page 123, line 15. Circean spells. Circe, according to 
Homer (Iliad, X., 135 ff.), dwelt in the island of ^Etea, attended 
by four nymphs, and all who approached her dwelling were 
feasted, and then, by means of her magic cup, transformed into 
beasts. 

Page 125, line 15, I can tell them, etc. The reference is to 
St. Luke vii. 8. Compare St. Matthew viii. 9. 

1. 23. friezes of never-ending stories. It was the custom of 
the Greeks to carve representations of stories on their temples. 
The frieze of the Parthenon at Athens represented, not a 
" story," but the Panathenaic procession. The stories were on 
the pediments ; but other temples undoubtedly had stories on 
the friezes, for instance, the temple of Pergamos. 

1. 25. before (Edipus . . . Memphis. (Edipus was king of 
Thebes ; Priam was king of Troy ; Tyre, one of the greatest and 
most famous cities of the ancient world, was the metropolis of 
Phoenicia ; Memphis was a great city of Egypt, and became its 
capital after the fall of Thebes. 

Page 128, line 5. near relative. Mrs. Baird Smith told Dr. 
Garnett that this was De Quincey's mother, 

1. 16. the dread book of account. Bevelation xx. 12. 



Page 13i>] NOTES 199 

Page 129, line 1. common light of day. Wordsworth, 
Ode on the Intimations of Immortal it y, V. ; also To the High- 
land Girl, 16-17 — " light of common day." 

1. 13. Livy. Titus Livius (b.o. 59-a.d. 17) wrote a history of" 
Rome in one hundred and forty-two books, — the most famous 
Roman history. 

Page 130, line 16. * a certain day. August 22, the day on 
which the royal standard was raised at Nottingham. 

11, 18-19. Marston Moor, etc. 3Iarston Moor, July 12, 1644 ; 
Newbury, October 16, 1644 ; Nasehy, June 14, 1645. 

Page 131, line 2. sweeping by. "In sceptered pall come 
sweeping by." — Milton, II Fenseroso,:9S. 

1. 3. Paulus or Marius. Lucius Paulus, surnamed Mace- 
donicus, born about b.c. 230. Conqueror of Macedonia. His 
triumphal entry into Rome was the most splendid in Roman 
history (b.c. 167). Gains Marius, born b.c. 157, and frequently 
consul at Rom e. He waged a triumphant war against the German 
hordes, and he was hailed as the saviour of his country. Both 
are names associated with the pomp of war, hence the reference. 

1. 5. alalagmos. "A word expressing collectively the 
gathering of the Roman war cries — Alala, Alala ! " — Masson. 
Greek, d\a\ay/x6s, a loud noise. 

1. 6. Piranesi. Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), an 
Italian architect and engraver. Garnett says that he never pub- 
lished any plates under the title Dreams. 

Page 132, line 13. a great modern poet . . . passage. The 
passage cited is from Wordsworth, The Excursion, Bk. II. 



200 NOTES [Page 133 

Page 133, line 12. Dryden. John Dryclcn (1631-1700), the 
famous eighteenth-century satirist, dramatist, and narrative 
poet. 

1. 13. Fuseli. Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), a Swiss painter 
of historical subjects. He lived in England. 

1. 18. Shadwell. Thomas Shadwell (1642P-1692), was the 
author of several dramas, and was satirized by Dryden in 
Macjlecknoe. 

1. 18. Homer is reputed, etc. On the strength of the lines 
quoted in the note to p. 72, 1. 20. 

Page 134, line 4. the last Lord Orford. Better known as 
Horace Walpole (1717-1797), author of The Castle of Otranto, 
(1746) and Letters. ' 

1. 9. though. The original text reads thought — a manifest 
misprint. 

Page 135, line 11. The causes of my horror, etc. Compare 
R. L. Stevenson, Across the Plains (Besjnsed Baces). 

Page 136, line 11. officina gentium. " Workshop of the 
nations." 

Page 137, lines 12-13. Brama . . . Vishnu . . . Seeva. The 

creative energy, the preserving power, and the destructive power, 
respectively, of the Brah manic religion. 

1. 14. Isis and Osiris. In the Egyptian religion Isis is the 
wife and feminine counterpart of Osiris, who is the good prin- 
ciple^ identified with the vivifying power of the sun and of the 
waters of the Nile. 



Page 141] NOTES 201 

Page 139, line 14. caeteris paribus. "Other things being 
equal." 

Page 141, line 11. a child whom I had tenderly loved. 

Little Kate Wordsworth. 

1. 17. first fruits of resurrection. From 1 Corinthians xv. 
20, a verse which occurs both in the Easter Anthem and in the 
'Lesson in the Order for the Burial of the Dead of the Church 
of England : " Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become 
the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, 
by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam 
all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man 
in his own order : Christ the first-fruits ; afterwards they that 
are Christ's at his coming." 

1. 18. I will walk abroad . . . unhappy no longer. Com- 
pare Tennyson, In 3Iemoriam^ LXXXVI : — 

** Sweet after showers, ambrosial air, 
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom 
Of evening over break and bloom 
And meadow, slowly breathing bare 

The round of space, and wrapt below 
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood, 
And shadowing down the horned tiood 

In ripples, fan my brows and blow 

The fever from my cheek, and sigh 
The full new life that feeds thy breath 
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death, 

111 brethren, let the fancy fly 



202 NOTES [Page 141 

From belt to belt of crimson seas 
On leagnes of odour streaming far, 
To where in yonder orient star 

A hundred spirits whisper ' Peace. ' " 

Page 142, line 0. shaded by Judean palms. Suggested by a 
figure seen on Roman coins. Works^ I., 64. 

1. 18. the tears were now wiped away. " And God shall 
wipe away all tears from their eyes." — Bevelation vii. 17, 
and xxi. 4. See also Isaiah xxv. 8. 

Page 143, line 6. final specimen. With this "final speci- 
men" compare Dream Fugue,, in The English Mail Coach, 
Sees. iv. and v. 

1. 11. Coronation Anthem. The Coronation Anthem was 
written in 1727, by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), for 
performance at the coronation ceremony of George II., in West- 
minster Abbey, October 11, 1727. 

Page 144, line 4. Deeper than ever plummet sounded. "I'll 
seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded." — Shakespeare, 
Tempest, III., iii., 101. 

1. 16. and with a sigh . . . death. The reference is to 
the speech of Sin, an "incestuous mother," because she, the 
daughter of Satan, bore to him Death, and because to Death 
she also bore "yelling monsters." — Milton, Paradise Lost, 
II., 648-814. 

" I fled and cried out Death ! 
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed 
From all her caves, and back resounded Death ! " 

— 11. 787-789. 



Page 158] NOTES 203 

1. 22. I will sleep no more. See note to p. 68, 1. 10. 

Page 147, line 15. a most innocent sufferer. " William 
Lithgovv (1582-1645 ?) : His book (Travels, &c.) is ill and 
pedantically writte]i : but the account of his own sufferings 
on the rack at Malaga is overpoweringly affecting." — Be 
Quincetfs Note. The title is The Totall Discourse of the Bare 
Adueutures and painfull Peregrinations of long Nineteene 
Yeares (1632). 

Page 148, line 16. Lord Bacon conjectures. ' ' Essay o n Death : 
' It is as natural to die as to be born ; and to a little infant 
perhaps the one is as painful as the other.'" — De Quincey^s 
Note (ed. 1856). The text of the London 3Iagazine reads 
Jeremy Taylor. 

Page 149, line 9. With dreadful faces, etc. Milton, Para- 
dise Lost, XII., 644. 

Page 151, lines 1-13. The interest . . . extraordinary his- 
tory. These lines are an editorial note in the London 3Iagazine, 
explaining the Appendix. See Editor's Introduction to the 
present edition. 

Page 153, line 14. fiat experimentum, etc. " Let the experi- 
ment be made upon a worthless object." 

Page 158, line 2. Beaumont and Fletcher. Francis Beau- 
mont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) wrote dramas 
in conjunction. Thierry and Theodoret was printed in 1621. 
The passage referred to is as follows : — 



204 NOTES [Page 158 

" (Thierry is brought in on a couch, with Doctors and 
Attendants.) 

"Thierry. Tell me, 
Can ever these eyes more, shut up in slumbers, 
Assure my soul there is sleep ? is there night 
And rest for human labours? do not you 
And all the world, as I do, out-stare Time, 
And live, like funeral lami>s, never extinguished? 
Is there a grave (and do not flatter me, 
Nor fear to tell the truth) , and in that grave 
Is there a hope I shall sleep ? can I die ? 
Are not my miseries immortal ? Oh, 
The happiness of him that drinks his water, 
After his weary day, and sleeps forever ! 
Why do you crucify me thus with faces, 
And gaping strangely upon one another! 
****** 

The eyes of Heaven 
See but their certain motions, and then sleep: 
The rages of the Ocean have their slumbers 
And quiet silver calms ; each violence 
Crowns in his end a peace ; but my fixed fires 
Shall never, never set! " — V., ii. 

1. 9. the old fable. The familiar fairy tale, The Sleeping 
Beauty in the Wood., which Tennyson has beautifully treated 
in his Day Dream. 

1. 15. I nunc, et versus tecum, etc. "Go now, and medi- 
tate harmonious verses." — Horace (b.c. 65-8), Epistles., II., ii , 
76. The i nunc is an ironical imperative to do something 
impossible or difficult. 



Page 163] NOTES 205 

Page 160, line 3. infandum renovare dolorem. " Infandum, 
regina, jubes renovare dolorem." "O (jueen, thou dost com- 
mand me to revive an unutterable grief!" — Virgil (b.c. 
70-19), uEneicl, II., 3. An excellent example of De Quincey's 
many felicitous literary allusions. 

Page 162, line 12. pretty rapid course of descent. " On 
w^hich last notice I would remark, that mine was too rapid, and 
the suffering therefore needlessly aggravated : or rather, per- 
haps, it was not sufficiently coritinuous and equably graduated." 
— De Quincey's Note (extract). 

Page 163, line 4. so rascally a subject. Bascally is a Shake- 
spearean word, meaning "base." 

1. 9. heautontimoroumenos. " Self -tormentor," the name 
of Terence's play quoted on p. 9, 1. 5. 

Page 164, line 16. Golgothas. St. Matthew xxvii. 33. 

Page 165, line 8. Roman prince. Caligula (a.d. 14-41). 

1. 16. Suetonius. Gains Suetonius Tranquillus, a Roman 
historian and scholar, born about a.d. 70. He wrote Vitoe 
Duodecim Ccesarum (Lives of the First Twelve Roman Em- 
perors). The reference is to his life of C. Csesar Caligula, 
38, where the words " vivere perse verarent " occur. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Achilles at the Siege of Troy, 188. 

Addington, Mr., 169. 

Adelung, 194. 

iEschylus, 175. 

a force d'ennuyer, 193. 

alcdagmos, 199. 

Alcfeus, 176. 

Alcaics, 176. 

a-muck, 194. 

Andromache, 188. 

Anastasius, 187-188, 193. 

li parte ante, 195-1^)6. 

a parte post, 195-19(3. 

a priori, 198. 

Archididasculus, 172. 

Athenaeus, 186. 

Aurora, 196. 

Awsiter, 169. 

Bacon, Lord, quotation, 203. 

Baird Smitli, Mrs., 198. 

Beaumont and Fletclier, quota- 
tion, 203-204. 

Behmenism, 191. 

bpllain internecinum, 195. 

Bible quotation, 1 Corinthians 
XV. 20 ff., 201. 

1 Corinthians xv. 43, 192. 



Psalm Iv. 6, 183. 

Revelation vii. 17, 202. 

Revelation xiv. 13, 190, 191. 

Revelation xxi. 4, 202. 

2 Samuel xii. 7, 197. 

reference, Isaiah xxv. 8, 202. 

Luke vii. 8, 198, 36-50, 182. 

Luke xvi. 26, 194. 

Matthew viii. 9, 198. 

Mattheio xxvii. 33, 205. 

Revelation xx. 12, 198. 

Blue-beard, 177. 

Bodleian, 192, 

Brama, 200. 

Browne, Sir T., 189. 

Browning, R., 189. 

Buchan's Domestic Medicine, 186. 

Burke, quotation, 167. 

cseieris paribus, 201. 

Caligula, 205. 

Carbery, Lady, 172. 

Carlisle, Dean of. (See Miluer, 

Isaac.) 
categories, Aristotle's ten, 196. 
Chaucer, quotation, 180, 194. 
Cicero, quotation, 195, 196. 
Cimarosa, 188. 



207 



208 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Circe, 198. 

Clarkson, Thomas, 195^. 

Coleridge, S. T., 109, 170, 195. 

and opium, 107. 

his poems and The Confes- 
sions, 169. 
contretems, 174. 
Coronation Anthem, 202. 
Cromwell, 176. 
Custos Rotulorum, 193. 

"Dash, Mr., the philosopher," 

168. 
Death, Raleigh's apostrophe to, 

191. 

A6i7rvocro<|)t(rTai, 186-187. 

De Quincey, Thomas, Medical 
view of his case, 171, 193. 

at Bath School, 171. 

at Winkfield School, 171. 

at Manchester School, 171. 

Chronology of the Confes- 
sions, 177-178. 

his father's name, 179. 

his father an author, 181. 

his mother's letters, 181. 

marries Margaret Simpson, 

184. 

Dickens, reference, 177, 179. 

Doctor's Commons, 179. 

Dryden, 200. 

Du Maurier, 189. 

Eatwell, Dr., 171. 
Ecclesiastlcus, quotation, 169. 



Eclectic philosopher, 194. 
Electra, 18.3-185. 
epigrams, Greek, 172, 192. 
Erskine, Lord, and opium, 168. 
^tourderie, 175. 
Eudfemonist, 193. 
Eumenides, 184. 
Euripides, 175. 

quotation, 183, 184. 

reference, 183, 184 bis, 184- 

185. 
evanesced, 185. 
ex cathedra, 186. 
exhibition, 188. 

fiat experbnentum in corpore vili^ 

203. 
Fichte, 192-193. 
Flatman, 185. 
Fletcher (see Beaumont). 
formaliter, 179. 
friezes, 198. 
Fuseli, 200. 

Goethe, 167. 
Goldsmith, 195. 
Golgothas, 205. 
Graces, 171-172. 
Grassini, 188. 
Gray, reference, 109, 198. 

Handel, 202. 
Han way, 195. 
Hazlitt, 170. 
Heautontlmoroumenos, 170, 205. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



209 



Hebe, 196. 

Hector, 188. 

Hekatonipylos, 192. 

He7inj F77/., quotation, 171, 19G. 

Homer, and opium, 200, 

quotation, 186. 

honi soil qui mal y pense, 193. 
Hope, Thomas, 188. 
Horace, quotation, 196, 204. 
Hwnani nihil a se alienuin putat, 
170. 

76/ omnis effiisus labor, 181. 

Iliad of woes, 196. 

infandiitn renovare dolorem, 205. 

in medias res, 196. 

i nunc et versus tecum, etc., 

204. 
Isis, 200. 

Jolmson, Dr., 177, 195. 

quotation, 172-173. 

Juvenal, quotation, 180. 

Kant, 192-193. 
Keats, quotation, 191. 

reference, 196. 

Kemble, 196. 

Kipling, reference, 188. 

Lawson, Mr., 171, 173. 
laying down, 177. 
Litligow, 203. 
Livy, 199. 



Magdalen, 182. 

Mail Coach, The, reference, 180, 

202. 
Margaret (Simpson), 184. 
Mariuus, 190. 
Marius, Gains, 199. 
materialiter, 179. 
Mead, 169. 
Memphis, 198. 
meo pericvlo, 186. 
Milner, Isaac, 168. 
Milton, quotation, II Penseroso, 

199. 
Paradise Lost, 174, 175 his, 

177, 178, 202, 203. 

Pai'adise Regained, 180. 

reference, Comus, 186. 

II Penseroso, 186. 

r Allegro, 186. 

Paradise Lost, 202. 

Paradise Regained, 197. 

Samson Agonistes, 197. 

Mithridates, 194. 
Montague, M. W., 181. 
more Socratico, 178. 
Morgan, Mr., 171. 
music, in praise of, 189. 
mysticism, 190-191. 

7ioli me tangere, 176. 

I'Vx^Tj/aepoi', 194. 

GEdipus, 198. 
officina gentium, 200. 

o i 77 o A A ot , 176. 



210 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Orforcl, Lord, 200. 
Osiris, 200. 
Otway, 182. 
Ovid, quotation, 186. 

pandiculation, 193. 
Pantheon, 185. 
Parnell, 169. 
Paulus, Lucius, 199. 
Fervlgiliuin Veneris, quotation, 
169. 

^ap ixaKov vrinevOe^, 186. 

Phidias, 192. 

(jxavapTa avv ero lai, 169. 

Pindar, 169. 

Piozzi, Mrs., 177. 

Piranesi, 199. 

Plato, 189. 

Pote's, 180. 

ponderlhuH llbrata suis, 186. 

Praxiteles, 192. 

Priam, 198. 

prima facie, 188. 

Proclus, 190. 

quietism, 191. 
Quincey, Thomas, 179. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, quotation, 

191. 
rascally, 205. 
Ricardo. 170,.198. 
Rossetti, D. G., reference, 189. 
Rousseau, 167. 



St. Thomas' Day, 195. 

Salisbury plain, 174. 

Sapphics, 176. 

Sappho, 176. 

Saracen's head, 182. 

Schelling, 192-193. 

Seeva, 200. 

Seven Sleepers, The, 174. 

Shadwell, and opium, 200. 

Shakespeare, quotation, Antony 
and Cleopatra, 180. 

.4.S You Like It, 182. 

King John, 180. 

Macbeth, 184. 

Tempest, 202. 

Twelfth Night, 188-189. 

reference, Hamlet, 197. 

Shelley, quotation, Revolt of Is- 
lam, 196. 

To a Skylark, 174. 

reference. Revolt of Islam, 

176. 

Siddons, 197. 

sine Cerere et Libero friget Ve- 
nus, 178. 

sleep, addresses to, Shakespeare, 
184. 

Euripides, 183. 

Beaumont and Fletcher, 204. 

Socrates, 178. 

soliciting, 179. 

soot, honey from, 190. 

Sophocles, 172, 175. 

Southey, quotation, 195. 

Spanish bridge, 197. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



211 



Spencer, Edward, 171. 
Spiiiosa, 197. 

Stevenson, R. L., quotation, 178- 
179. 

reference, 200. 

stoic pliilosophy, 193-194. 
Suetonius, 205. 
Swinburne, quotation, 176. 
reference, 196. 

Tartarus, 177. 

Tennyson, quotation, 176, 201. 

reference, 201. 

Terence, quotation, 170, 178. 

reference, 205. 

terrse incognitse, 190. 

Thebes, 198. 

Thierry and Theodoret, 203. 

Thomson, James, quotation, 195. 

Trophonius, Cave of, 190. 

Tyre, 198. 

Vane, Sir Henry, 191. 

Virgil, quotation, Georgics, 181. 

yEneid, 205. 

Vishnu, 200. 



Walpole, Horace, 200. 

Weld, 189. 

Whitman, Walt, 178. 

Wilberforce, and opium, 168. 

Wilson, John, 171. 

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 197. 

Wordsworth, Kate, 193, 201. 

Wordsworth, William, 175, 183. 

quotation, Daffodils, 170. 

Excursion, 192 bis, 199. 

Highland Girl, 199. 

Immortality (Ode on), 178, 

199. 

Power of Music, 185. 

Resolution and Indepen- 
dence, 194. 

She icas a Phantom, 178. 

Sonnet, " Nuns Fret Not," 

173. 

White Doe of Rijlstone, 167, 

192. 

reference, The Prelude, 173. 

attracts De Quincey to the 

north, 175, 182. 

X. Y. Z., 193. 



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Principles of English Grammar 

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American Prose Selections 

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